2 Advent

 

December 8, 2024

 

Luke 3.1-6

 

+  We are now well into this strange and beautiful season ofAdvent.

 

As I’ve said before—and will no doubt say again—I love thisseason.

 

You all know:

 

(This is a terrible thing for your priest-poet to say, but…)

 

I’m not a big Christmas fan.

 

I never have been.

 

But Advent. . . that is right up my alley.

 

Prophets and prophecies fulfilled.

 

God coming to us.

 

Talk about the end of things.

 

It’s all so fantastic and yet so compelling.

 

And just when we think we have it all kind of figured out, who dowe encounter?

 

In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with the formidable figureof John the Baptist.

 

I used to not like John the Baptist.

 

He always seemed kind of frightening to me.

 

He was kind of crazy, after all.

 

But over the years I’ve really come to like John the Baptist.

 

He is actually an incredible saint.

 

And someone very important to the story of Jesus.

 

Certainly it would be difficult for any of us to take the words ofa man like this seriously.

 

Especially when he’s saying things like, “prepare the way of theLord, make his paths straight.”

 

How could WE do any such thing?

 

How do we make pathways straight?

 

Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims it, this is not somuch hopeful as frightening.

 

It is a message that startles us and jolts us at our very core.

 

But this—whether we like it or not—is the true message of Advent.

 

Like John the Baptist and those who eagerly awaited the Messiah,this time of waiting was almost painful.

 

When we look at it from that perspective, we see that maybe Johnisn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially thought.

 

Rather his message is one of almost excruciating expectation.

 

Which we talked about last week in my sermon.

 

For us, as followers of Jesus, we too are living with thisexcruciating expectation.

 

But our expectation is not something we do complacently.

 

We don’t just sit here and twiddle our thumbs in our patientwaiting.

 

Rather, in our expectation, we do what John the Baptist and otherprophets did.

 

And what is that?

 

We prophesy.

 

We proclaim.

 

We assess the situation, and strengthened by what we know iscoming to us, we make a kind of educated guess—inspired by God’s Spirit—at howit will all turn out.

 

And we profess and proclaim that message.

 

Our job as prophets is to echo the cry of the Baptist:

 

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make the paths of God straight.”

 

We should find ways to prepare for God’s coming to us.

 

We do it in many ways during Advent.

 

We light the candles of the Advent wreath.

 

We listen to the message of the prophets from the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

We slow down and we ponder who it is we are longing for.

 

And we wait…

 

As prophets, as fellow seers of the future, we are proclaiming thatmoment when the Messiah will come to us.

 

We know he is coming.

 

We know his coming is imminent.

 

But sometimes he seems so agonizingly slow in his coming to us.

 

One of my favoritebooks is called The Forgotten DesertMothers.

 

It is a book about earlyChristians who took the words we heard this morning from the Baptist asliterally as they could.

 

These desert mothersand fathers have a lot to teach us.

 

Like, us, they livedin an age of uncertainty.

 

Many had suffereddearly during the persecutions against Christians in the early years of theChurch.  

 

Others had previouslybeen pagans who lived lives of excess.  

 

It was a time whennothing in the world seemed stable.

 

Governments gave wayto stronger governments.

 

Differing religionsbattled each other for what each perceived to be “the truth.”

 

And so too did manyChristians.    

 

It sounds familiardoesn’t it?

 

In the face of all ofthis uncertainty, these men and women heard the call of the Baptist. “Preparethe way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

 

In response they didsomething we might find unusual.

 

We, as modernChristians, are taught that we must not only live out our faith, but also, insome way, must proclaim our faith to those around us.  

 

We take seriously thecommand to go out into the world and proclaim what we believe.

 

It is what we do whenwe go out to feed the hungry or to tend the sick.

 

We do it when wereach out to others in the name of God.

 

These earlyChristians, however, did the exact opposite.

 

They retreated fromsociety and went off to the desert, in this case usually the deserts of Egyptand Palestine.  

 

Oftentimes, comingfrom wealthy homes and positions of authority, they sold it all, gave the moneyto the poor and went off to live alone.  

 

And we’re not talkingabout a few individuals here.

 

We’re talking aboutpeople leaving in droves.  

 

The deserts wereliterally populated with men and women who tried to leave it all behind.

 

More often than not,they formed loosely-organized communities, usually around a church, in whichthey lived and prayed alone for most of the time, only coming together to praythe Psalms or celebrate Eucharist.  

 

Their lives in thedesert weren’t, as you can imagine, comfortable lives by any means. 

 

Some walledthemselves up in abandoned tombs.

 

Others lived incaves.

 

One went so far as tocrawl stop a tall pillar and live there for years on end, exposed to theelements.  

 

Even then theycouldn’t completely escape what they left behind.

 

Many of the storiestell of these poor souls being tormented by demons and temptations.

 

It’s not hard toimagine that, yes, alone in a dark tomb or cave, one would be forced to faceall the darkest recesses of one’s soul.

 

Part of the processof separating one’s self from the world involved finally wrestling with allthose issues one carries into the desert.

 

Few of us in this dayand age would view this kind of existence as the ideal Christian life.

 

In fact, most ofwould probably look on it as a sort of insanity.  

 

But at the time, inthat place, people began to see this as the ideal.

 

People, I imagine,were tired of the day-to-day grind of working, slaving, fending for themselvesin a sometimes unfriendly society.

 

They felt distantfrom God and they were not able to find God in the society in which they lived. 

 

The idea of going offand being alone with God was very appealing.

 

Of course, even thisseemingly simple and pure way of living was soon tarnished by another formexcess.

 

Some of the peoplewho went off to live in the desert were simply mentally unsound to begin with.

 

Others went insaneafter years of living alone in a tomb or a cave.

 

They abused theirbodies, sometimes to the point of death, by whipping themselves, by chainingthemselves to walls, by not taking care of themselves physically, or simplystarving themselves to a point close to death.  

 

But despite theseabuses, the message of the desert mothers and fathers to us is still a validone.

 

The whole reason theywent off like they did was to shed everything that separated them from theirwaiting for God.  

 

They sought to maketheir very lives a living Advent.  

 

They were waitingexpectantly and anxiously for God’s Messiah.

 

And by mortifyingthemselves, by chastising their bodies and fasting, they would be prepared forhis coming again.  

 

Although I hope noone here is called to a life quite that extreme, I think their message speaksto us clearly in these days before Christmas.

 

We should find waysto prepare for God’s coming to us.

 

In this season, overwhelmed by all that is happening around us, wefind ourselves reacting in our own ways.

 

Our own lives can be frightening.

 

And at times, these moments of expectation are frightening.

 

But, still, even in these frightening moments, we should remember:we are prophets.

 

We can assess the situation—as ugly and bitter as it is—and,inspired by God’s Spirit, see that there is a positive outcome.

 

Always.

 

God’s Messiah is coming.

 

Yes, not at the speed we want him to come.

 

But he is coming.

 

And in that moment, prophets that we are, enlightened by God’sSpirit as we are, seeing into the dark of the future, we can look  forward in hope.

 

We, the prophets, find that we can now see the goal for which weare working.

 

We can look into the gloom, into the frightening future and seethat all is not lost.

 

God’s Messiah, the Chosen One, is coming.

 

He is coming to us.

 

He is coming to us in this place in which we seem sometimes toflounder.

 

He comes to us in these moments when we feel overwhelmed.

 

He comes to us in those moments when it seems we have lost.

 

He comes to us in our defeat.

 

And when he does, even in those moments, we know.

 

Truly the summation of our prophecies is upon us.

 

And what is that summation?

 

It is the fact that, in the coming of God’s Messiah “all fleshshall see the salvation of God” in our midst.

 

And with that realization, with that actualization, we are liftedfrom those waters and from the dark mire and muck of our lives.

 

And we are restored.

 

Once and for all time.

 

S0, do what prophets do.

 

Rejoice!

 

Proclaim the way of the Lord!

 

The Messiah is coming!

 

God is close at hand!

 

Rejoice!

 

Amen.