Sermon on December 6, 2020: Advent 2
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
John the Baptizer is the kind of person who should make us nervous. He sees things that we do not see; he hears things we do not hear. Does he hear the voice of God, or is he mentally unstable? I suppose that his neighbors asked themselves the same question, before walking down to the River Jordan to see the spectacle, and perhaps even to be baptized themselves. Who is this man, this forerunner, crying out in the wilderness, preaching about a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”?
John is an oddball, but he is also a prophet and like all good prophets, he tells it like it is. In this day and age, when I hear that someone “tells it like it is,” I wonder what that really means. Sometimes it means putting others down in public, for the sake of one’s own agenda or one’s ego. True prophets do tell it like it is, but they do not have an agenda; they may speak their mind, but it’s not about their ego. On the other hand, we can understand prophets as having only have one agenda, which is to be the messengers of God, to open themselves up as a mouthpiece for God. And when John the Baptist tells it like it is, he does not do it to puff himself up; rather, he calls himself unworthy. “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals,” he says. As a prophet, John the Baptist sees reality with razor-sharp clarity; he sees himself and his own sinfulness, and the ways that he is inadequate, unworthy. That is why he can preach repentance, and call others to come and be baptized and have their sins washed away: because he recognizes his own sinfulness, his own unworthiness.
We are now in the second week of Advent, the season of preparation, of watching and waiting. As we know, Advent is a penitential season, where we are encouraged to make a special effort to examine our conscience, so that we may repent of our sins and return to the Lord. To use the language of John the Baptist, in Advent, we are called to take crooked paths and make them straight. That’s what spiritual disciplines help us to do—whether we are fasting, or making an extra effort to pray, or giving our money or our time—they help us to see where our crooked paths are so that we can reshape them, and make them a fitting road for Christ to walk on. And prophets are those who are continually reminding us that this is the spiritual work that we have to do, a work that is a matter of life and death.
As I said in my sermon last week, now that we’re 40+ weeks into a worldwide pandemic, we may not quite be in the mood for a penitential season, for examining our conscience and looking for the ways we need to repent. The suggestion right now that we need to repent is almost like adding insult to injury. Then again, I doubt that there is ever a time when we are really in the mood for penitence, that we are really feeling ready to repent. In the same way that the pandemic has exposed the societal malaise that was always there below the surface, only now being widely exposed in the light of the crisis, now is the moment for Christians to examine our consciences, and the ways we have been complicit in injustice, and searching out those things of which our conscience is afraid. This is why we have prophets: this is the work that they help us to do, whether or not we want to be helped to do it.
Who are the modern-day prophets? Is there a prophet like John the Baptist who is alive right now, somewhere out there, who dares to speak for God? Words like prophet, prophecy, and “speaking prophetically” carry so much baggage that we can’t be sure whether we’re looking at the real thing or a counterfeit. And in the wake of the culture wars and the crisis of information, one person’s prophet is another’s conspiracy theorist. In spite of all that, there are a few marks of a prophet. The first is that a prophet may be a person of influence, but they are never in positions of power. We can’t look for prophets among the politicians and those who rule; we must look for them among the power-less. The second mark of a prophet is that they expose the truth about systemic and societal sin—how the sins of the powerful have oppressed the creatures of God—people, animals, and land. Take any one of the Old Testament prophets, diverse people as they were, and they will meet those two criteria. So does John the Baptist. And if it’s true that God still does speak through prophets today, the same would apply to them as well. Prophets are not among the powerful; instead, they tell the powerful the truth about their sin. Which incidentally is a very dangerous thing to do. Prophets have a way of losing their heads—as did John the Baptist, the voice who cried out in the wilderness.
John had something of a following, he had a little movement going, but he was, in the end, an obscure figure. Were it not for the gospels, his story would never have been written. Yet God saw fit to make him the one to announce the coming of the Son of God. And that tells us something very important: it tells us that God is not concerned with headlines. When God became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ, none of the “important” people at the time had the faintest idea. Instead, God travels along the paths of the ordinary, and even the obscure. God makes a home among an ordinary people, is announced by an obscure prophet, and in the process, makes all creation new. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, which is the story of God, is not announced in glory or majesty, but in hushed and muted tones. Announced from the mouth of the obscure and the easily-dismissed. Showing us that God’s majesty is hidden in the mundane, and is found in the mouths of strange characters. It’s a majesty that is clothed in the ordinary—in flesh and blood, in camel’s hair and leather belts, locusts and wild honey.
God makes a home in the ordinary. We too are ordinary people, and God wants to make a home within us. Our work is to prepare the house—to prepare our hearts, and make them ready. As we continue our Advent journey, even in a time such as this, let us heed the Baptist’s cry, and turn away from anything that will block Christ’s coming into our hearts, so “that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.”
I have spoken these words to you in the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.