Advent 2

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Advent 2
PROPER: Year C
PLACE: St. John’s Parish, Kingsville
DATE: December 7,1997

TEXT: Luke 3:1-6 - He (John the Baptist) went into all the region of around Jordon, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

ISSUE: Luke is specific in identifying the important work of John the Baptist. He is the last of the great prophets that calls for repentance for the forgiveness of sins. John’s repentance means “change of mind,” or “broadening of horizons,” or more dramaticially “genuine conversion.” Members of the church, like the Jews of John’s time become settled and complacent. But the coming of Jesus Christ triggered dramatice changes in the religious complacency. It was a soul searching recognition of religion that was sometimes empty and exclusive, lacking in conveying the love and marvelous works of God.
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The Advent Season is a very important one in the life of the church. Much of the world, I’m afraid does not value its importance. Preparation for the coming of the Savior, for the coming of God, is simply a matter of cleaning house, buying many presents, and getting out some of the same old stuff with which to decorate the house, with an occasional new set of Christmas lights or decorations thrown in. The Advent Season of preparation for us involved in the church are confronted and challenged by the season to be ready to get on the high what that leads to the Glory of God in our lives. Getting onto the highway that God is building where the valleys are lifted up and the high place made plain requires some serious attention to the road maps of our lives. Otherwise we remain lost on the back roads that lead to nowhere.
Our attention today is on the Gospel of Luke who tells of the ministry of John the Baptist. Let me begin by saying that we need to be some what careful about our interpretations and understandings of the gospels. The gospels are not specifically historical. They are interpretative of the ministry and the great meaning of Jesus Christ and the lives and ministries of the people around him that we find in the gospels. They proclaim the meaning of Jesus’ life and ministry as God come among us. In and through him we feel and know the presence of God. However there are some attempts in the Gospels to make them specific in terms of the time that something occured in order that we might grasp its importance and its significant meaning.
In today’s account, Luke is giving an historical setting. John the Baptists ministry was going strong during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pilate was governor in Judea, and Herod was ruling in the province of Galilee, etc. Annas and Caiahaps are the high priests of the period in the Jerusalem temple. Suddenly God begins once again to make a profound effect on human history. John the Baptist, who is a rebellious type of priest, and the son of the priest Zechariah, is profoundly moved by God to be a prophet. John is presented in the scriptures as a very dynamic prophet who calls for a people to be baptized into repentance for the forgiveness of their sins. He is a forceful character with charisma, patterned on the much beloved Elijah the prophet. Elijah was a prophet who took on the powers of his time, King Ahaz and the wicked Queen Jezebel. He challenged the paganism of his time when he humiliated the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. So Luke’s Gospel account is kind of saying, ‘Here we go again.’ Now in this time of Emperor Tiberious, God through John the Baptist is calling his own people to the giving up of their sins and taking on a time of repentance through a baptismal ritual.
In John’s time,. Jews themselves were not baptized. They were Jewish by virtue of their heritage and cicumcision. However, Gentiles who converted to Judaism did go through a ritual of baptism which symbolized the taking on of a a new life completely divorced from their old life of paganism and sin. To become Jewish and to be a part of the inseparable faith of Judaism was to put on a whole new life. In this event today, John is calling upon all Jews, all of his people to be baptized, to be totally repentant and receive forgiveness and begin a new life with God who is ready to come upon and to them. Obviously inspite of all the heritage of which the people boasted, John saw something lacking in their way of life. Their religion may have settled over them and was a part of their heritage, but the deeper issue of what was in the heart and what was manifested in behavior was quite different. They needed a cleansing immersion in to something renewing.
It is important to understand what “repentance” meant for these people. To repent meant to change your mind. It meant to broaden your horizons. It meant to turn over a new leaf. It meant - dare I say it? - to be converted. John the Baptist and prophet was about the business of calling men and women to a dramatic, dynamic, spirited conversion, significant change. By the time Luke was writing this account of the gospel, the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed, and never as it turns out to be rebuilt. God was now calling his people to repentance change and a readiness of something new. It was as if as Isaiah had prophesied every valley shall be filled in and every and every mountain shall be made low and all flesh, all people, shall see the coming salvation of God. Tough as John was, there was a message of hope in his preaching, but for John the hope could not be realized until there was a willing free repentace taking place, a willingness to be changed and converted.
In many instances today, pophetic types are not particularly popular. Our images of prophets today are sometimes taken from magazines, like ‘The New Yorker,’ which shows cartoons of prophets as these characters with beards dressed in long robes and carrying a placard which declares “Repent, the end is near.” The prophetic call is seen as humous, something weird out of the past. It’s funny in our technological and scientific age, which is, is it fair to say, largely unthreated by God, or at least an age not in fear of God. At the same time, the present post-modern age is not very taken with the Advent season which recalls the prophetic age of John the Baptist.
Yet, there are some prophetic things happening both in and without of the church. There are some people who believe that the Cursillo movement, which started in the Spanish Roman Catholic Church is a prophetic movement. It has touched many Christian people calling them to a deeper spiritual commitment and to a renewal of their appreciation of the Christian faith and their active involvement in Christianity. Another significant prophetic movement which we are hearing more about all the time is the Promise Keepers Movement. It is becoming very clear that manyt many men in our society have lost, forgotten, or abandoned having a genuine and sincere relationship with God and what that means. Some men are coming to their senses and recognizing that carousing unfaithfulness, drunkeness, is destroying their lives, humiliating their wives, and destroying their children.
Inspite of the fact that there is a church on nearly every other corner in this country, and inspite of the fact that we print “In God We Trust” on our currency, the real impact of a godly people seems somewhat lacking in our own society. There is a great deal of flirtation with paganism. While the churches are there and the motto stands, there is still a stepping outside the boundaries of religious faith and immersing ourselves into a godless secularism that implies a lot of quick easy cheap thrills. There is a certain pleasure and longing for a kind of soap opera existence, an invested interest in being beautiful people at any cost without any consequences. The consequences of unhealthy lifestyles are real. On TV, the show is over and we turn off the TV and go to bed. In reality smoking, excessive drinking destroy people’s health. Casual sexuality leads to awful diseases. Carrying guns and weapons around in our pockets leads to violence and death and real dead people don’t get up again. to be godless, to step away from God the Creator is too step into emptiness. The old old story of Adam and Eve eating the apple, a symbol of their falleness and desire to flirt with Godlessness had its consequences. They were outside the real garden and it wasn’t easy. There is a real need in the society of which we are all apart to be sensitive to our flirtations with emptiness of Godlessness, with a way that leads to Cain killing Abel and all that that imples. We are in need of repentance and conversion to our need for God.
Another example is the conversion we need in terms of our environmental issues. As human beings, and as Americans, we are consuming the earth’s resources at an alarming rate, and many species of animals all linked to the overall food chain and interlocked scheme of creation are being wiped out. Prophets are warning us, and they are not dressed in camel’s hair and carring placards but their message is clear. We need to be converted, immersed into another way of thinking and living simpler lives. God is calling us to salvation. We need to be prepared to follow along the road where the crooked places are made straight and the high places plain, or live with the barriers that keep us constrained in disaster and despair.
The institutionalized Church of God is not itself immuned to the need for conversion and repentance. Even the church today is suffering in its own crisis. But, it is often the citadel and the refuge for those who do not want to change or be converted. For many the church is a place of comfort and security from a changing and a difficult world. Yet repeatedly the national press tells us that the mainline churches are in crisis. The church is often seen as the place where only “good” people go. It is often seen as the place that is negative and is “against” everything. The church was once against the idea that the earth was round. The churchd was seen as against Darwin’s therory of evolution. The church today is often perceived as against abortion, against homosexuality, against divorce. What’s more for an extended period of time the church supported slavery, and still today struggles with the place of women in the church and the society. People have conveyed to me over the years that they don’t want to come to church and here the problems of the world talked about in sermons. Yet, living to ourselves escaping from the issues of the world, we may ulitmately die by ourselves.
Clearly, John the Baptist was a prophetic voice of God crying in the wilderness of human sinfulness and emptiness. He called for the conversion and the reclaiming of God. When the mighty God came he wanted his people to be ready to be with God as he came down the four lane. He reclaimed the hope that they would indeed, by the help and presence of God, be a light to the nations of the world.
It is comfortable for us to come here, to gather in comfortableness to hear the prayers read and the music sung for us. It is comforting for some to remember that they grew up here in this old church and that they may even have been acolytes when they were little and old Mr. Parker was the minister here. It is comforting to have had family worship here in years past. It’s a good old place that has stood the test of our time. It’s a nice burial ground with lots of memories. It’s pretty. But is that the point? Is that what we are about? Does that kind of religious mentality in anyway resonate with the great prophets and teachers of the faith like John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth? John called for a complete turn around, a conversion, a readiness for the God of sacrificial love and deep sensitive caring. Our only hope and salvation is in turning and surrendering to God and following God and taking direction from him, that we too may not be a group of staid and moldy folk Episcopalians enveloped in ages of religious masturbation. The fertile and creative Lord is coming to recharge, reshape, and renew us. He’s coming down the pike. And as he comes John calls for repentance, change, renewed minds, conversion that all flesh may see the salvation of God.