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Second Sunday in Advent, December 7, 2003
Sermon on Luke 3: 1-6 (RCL) by David Zersen

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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, in 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 about the Jordan, preaching 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 brought low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways shall be made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (RSV, 1971)

A BURNING YEARNING

No one dares to say what they really want for Christmas! It's really too difficult to put our wants and needs into words. They lie deep beneath the surface. We can cover up our real longing with this season's offerings from Hammacher-Schlemmer-- for example, a $2500 Route 66 gum ball machine, which we surely don't need and, perhaps, after a few weeks, will not want. We can even obscure our deepest needs with lullabies and nativity plays about “Sweet lil Jesus Boy.” The more mature among us, however, will know that something is amiss in this annual celebration in which we all too quickly buy the gifts and sing the songs.

What is missing can be an appropriate use of the Advent season! Its traditional readings press us to look beneath the surface. They challenge our hearts and minds, rehearsing why we have to experience Advent before we can understand Christmas. They remind us what unpopular Amos said when he shouted, “Why do you long for the day of the Lord? That day will be darkness and not light” (Amos 5:18 ). They bring us face to face with fire-breathing, hair-shirted, remarkably successful John.

One can only wonder whether old Zechariah and Elizabeth could have imagined a son like this. From the beginning, he was committed, as were many children of religious parents, to an ascetic life without parties (no wine or fermented drink, Lk. 1:15 ) or luxury. From the beginning, he was set aside as one who would put parents in touch with their children and challenge disobedient people to long to improve the quality of their lives (1:17). Could they have imagined that long before television evangelists and tent-meeting revivals, people would flock to him by the thousands and begin a legacy which it would be difficult to bring to a close—even when the One for whom he prepared people had taken his center-stage place? John may be a bizarre character, but he has a message each of us needs to hear.

A WORD IN THE WILDERNESS

Luke wants us to know that John was a last-chance Old Testament prophet. He made his home in the Judean wilderness, a desert-like wasteland. He separated himself from society. He ate and drank subsistence fare, wore simple clothing, got back to the basics. He did it not because he was a weirdo, but because, in the tradition of God's prophets, he wanted to get beneath the surface to acquire an interior view of what philosophers might like to call “the human predicament.” What he found was personal, unexpected. It cut to the core, it cleared the mind. Luke tells us John heard a “word from God.”

The word in the wilderness John heard was about repentance, a word so little understood in our time. We would prefer to ignore repentance because it involves coming to grips with all those things which stand in the way of life as it was meant to be lived. Deep beneath the surface of our daily activities roam jealously and pride that lead to personal conflict. Underneath our pleasantries rage self-centeredness and defensiveness that leads to alienation in relationships, and divorce in marriage. Behind the busyness of this season roars the unwillingness to listen and understand which leads to preemptive wars and never-ending retaliation! John wants us to take some time to explore our human psyche and call such behavior into question. He wants us to be upset by it, to cry out because of it, to long to be free of it. He calls for a burning yearning for repentance, for change, for new life. The amazing thing is that people in John's day flocked to accept his baptism because they desperately wanted to be free from their bondage. Is it not possible that we Advent Christians are yearning for the same thing?

In Dostoevsky's great novel, Crime and Punishment , Raskolnikov has committed a murder and cannot free himself from his guilt at a deep level of his existence because he has allowed God entrance only to superficial levels. When Sonya, a prostitute, tells him the story about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, it gradually awakens him to the need to acknowledge and confess those things which lurk in the deepest levels of his psyche and this produces his own rising from the dead. His repentance frees him to experience a transformation in his life which is profoundly spiritual and psychological. It is a transformation which awaits all of us as we ponder the meaning of John's call to repentance in this Advent season. What we really need this Christmas cannot be explored until we have come to grips with the things that are raging in the deep wastelands of our lives.

A WORD TO THE WORLD

Luke wants us to know that what God is calling John to proclaim is like what Isaiah proclaimed from Baghdad (ancient Babylon ) 500 years earlier. A liberation/salvation from that ancient city's captivity would lead an emancipated people to make their way home on paths cut right through the desert's obstacles. By analogy, Luke tells us that the mountains and rugged terrain, the evils in our lives which stand in the way of full salvation, need to be confessed and repented of because God's love and forgiveness is about to claim us. This day of the Lord will not be darkness, but light!

You know how important this message was to Luke? He sets it within a historical context so that there's no mistaking that this was real, telling us exactly who was ruling, when and where. Then he adds to Mark's own citation of this story two important details. People don't just flock to John in the desert; John goes out to find them in the entire Jordan valley region. He does this because, Luke adds to Mark's citation of Isaiah, this is salvation for all mankind! This is so important that you have to find your spouse, your best friend, your office colleague, your neighbor, and tear down those obstacles that stand between you. You have to enter the wastelands you have created by your actions and make straight the crooked roads and smooth the rough paths. God is coming, with the fullness of his forgiving love— and that can mean nothing (no matter how many lullabies you sing and gifts you give!) unless those dimensions and levels of your life where night reigns begin to anticipate, burn and yearn for, the forgiving light of Christ. This is why Advent is important, not only for you, but for all those in your familial, collegial and social circles. People are waiting for you to help prepare the way, to make Christmas the celebration of canceled sin and extravagant grace it seeks to be. People with names you know may have been waiting for such gifts all their lives.

HEARING THE WORD

We can't leave this word of hope without hearing from someone who once helped make the crooked straight in his own Advent season. His name is St. Anselm and he was baptized on this day in 374. He became bishop of Milan , then the capital of the Western empire, and he was one of the most important Latin authors of the era, a powerful preacher and a hymn writer. Augustine, not yet a Christian and certainly not a “saint,” used to lurk outside Anselm's cathedral, listening to the hymns. Deeply moved by them, he found that the sins he found it hard to confess were summoned to the surface by them. In his famous Confessions (IX, 6-7) he writes:

The tears flowed from me when I heard your hymns and canticles, for the
sweet singing of your church moved me deeply. The music surged in my
ears, truth seeped into my heart, and my feelings of devotion overflowed,
so that the tears streamed down. But they were tears of gladness.

The remarkable thing is that we can still hear and sing what Augustine heard, as did Martin Luther after him, who set the verses into German of Ambrose's great Advent hymn, Savior of the Nations Come:

Father's equal, you will win, Vic'tries for us over sin.
Might eternal, makes us whole; heal our ills of flesh and soul.

From the manger newborn light sends a glory through the night.
Night cannot this light subdue, faith keeps springing ever new.

They are words that also surge in our ears and seep into our heart. We stand at the threshold of Christmas, and, center stage, the Lord of Judgment whom we already know as our Lord of Grace, claims us as his own. Plans have been made for dinners and gifts and parties. Concerts and plays are on the calendar. But deep within us, at levels we prefer to ignore, John's voice calls us to make the rough places plain, to set things to rights, to clear the air, to cancel the debts, to right the wrongs, to make straight the path. Our Advent Lord already stands at the doors of these hidden cellars and knocks. We know that “night cannot subdue this light.” Advent is here and Christmas is coming. We yearn to give gifts that mean something this year. There is work to do. And there may be tears. But they are tears of gladness.

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President emeritus
Concordia University at Ausitn
Austin , Texas
dzersen@aol.com


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