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Sunday, December 06, 2009

Prepare Yourself

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Luke 3:1-5  

¹ 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, ² during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. ³ He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, ⁴ 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. ⁵ 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.

Today is the second Sunday of the Advent season-the season to prepare ourselves and make room for Christ’s birth.

That means we light advent candles, we sing hymns like O Come Emmanuel and Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, and it means that we get to meet, again, one of the really colorful characters of the Bible: John the Baptizer!

What do we remember about John?  First, he was Jesus’ cousin. John’s mother Elizabeth and Mary the mother of Jesus were cousins. Elizabeth was somewhat older than Mary. Do you remember who the first person Mary travels to see when she learns that she is pregnant? She goes immediately to see her cousin, Elizabeth, who was also pregnant with John the Baptizer.

John grew up with some rather strict rituals and behaviors, and when he began his mission of reform and renewal, he lived in the desert just north of the Dead Sea and subsisted on locusts and wild honey. There, close to the Jordan River, he baptized people as a way of getting them to clean up their act.

Curiously, in most of the Renaissance paintings of the boy Jesus and his family, there is almost always another child in the painting with Jesus and that child is his cousin John the Baptizer.

John had a reputation for bluntness and telling it like it is. He called out the respectable people in the long robes and fancy garb. He called them snakes and vipers and told them to stop preening and to do some things to really show compassion and justice.

“If you have two coats give one away. If you have food and someone else does not, then share what you have.”

His reform movement was important because the religious leaders had gotten complacent and lazy and had forgotten they were called to serve God and to serve the people. John’s message was one Jesus agreed with and that is why Jesus himself, at the beginning of his ministry, went straight to John to be baptized, by John. Jesus wanted to identify with this message of change and to signify a new turning in his own life.

John’s message was one of change, unsettling change. He gave us the images from the Prophet Isaiah that make us Coloradans VERY uncomfortable. These images are pictures of mountains being leveled, rough places made smooth, crooked roads and paths being straightened out. We meet John in Advent because it is important for us to do what he says in order to get some things straight again, to turn more toward God and away from greed and self.  It is necessary to make room, get rid of what clutters us, so that there is room for Christ to be born.

Also, important is the story from the Gospel of Luke that we are reading today and the next few Sundays. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus shakes people up more than in any other of the gospels. He keeps associating with the wrong people; outcasts, sinners, shills for the Roman occupation, sick people, and impure people. He is not “religious” enough because he loves to go to dinner parties with anyone. He is even called a drunkard and glutton because he is not an ascetic like his cousin John.

In Luke’s version of the Christmas story the first people who come to the manger after Jesus is born are not the elite, status conscious, upper-crust people. Who are the first persons to come and honor Christ? They are shepherds, nobodies in the first century world and lowest on the status ladder. They are smelly, scraggly, excitable shepherds who cannot contain their joy that the savior has been born for them, for us, for all of us, the powerful and the poor and the lowly.

This is the gospel of Luke, the gospel where Jesus says something different in Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus does not say, Blessed are the poor in spirit. What does he say? “Blessed are the poor.” Luke’s gospel tells us that the birth of the savior is for everyone, for everyone: the poor, the broken, the least, the last, the doubting, the wounded, the sure and the certain and the uncertain-everyone.

It is in Luke where we find the most familiar and most profound of Jesus’ unsettling parables. The two most important parables that only show up in Luke are the parable of the Prodigal Son and the parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable of the Prodigal Son says God is like this father, God’s nature is GRACE. God is accepting and forgiving and gracious-more gracious and kind than we are, thank God. And, the parable of the Good Samaritan says that this unsettling, prophetic Jesus, our savior, wants us to be like the Samaritan in the story who sees a wounded man in need and cares for him, even though the man is more unlike the Samaritan than anyone else, because the wounded man is a Jew.

The baby Jesus grows up to be prophet and messiah who will shake us up before he settles us down into a new direction. Be cautious about letting him into your life. You will be changed and cleaned up and straightened out. That’s what John is warning us about and about which he is announcing the good news!

One more characteristic of the Gospel of Luke, that we need to know the next few weeks, is that the heroes in this story of Jesus are OLD PEOPLE-really old people-older than Brett Favre.  Zechariah, John’s father, was old-over 50!! Elizabeth, John’s mother, appeared to be past child bearing age.

And just a few days after Jesus’ birth, when Mary and Joseph take him to the Temple in Jerusalem to dedicate him, they meet two other old people. You probably have not read or heard this part of the story about two people named Simeon and Anna. They are in the Christmas story in chapter two of Luke right after the shepherds have left and gone back to their sheep. Simeon has been waiting in the temple courtyard for years hoping to see God’s messiah. When Mary and Joseph bring the new born baby to God’s house, Simeon recognizes who this is, takes the baby in his arms, thanks God that he has been able to see the Christ, and then tells Mary, the mother, that this controversial, unsettling baby will cause the salvation and the destruction of many in Israel, and that sorrow like a sword will pierce her heart.

Anna comes along in the temple, a prophetess who was 84 years old, and blesses the new born baby as well.

In the gospel of Luke, some of the heroes are old people! People who have lived long enough to know what matters most. People who have uncluttered their lives and focused on what lasts and not on the transient values of appearance and celebrity and fame. (The Salahi couple in DC needs to meet some people like Simeon and Anna who can tell them how wrongheaded and misguided they are.)

By the way, those wise elders are certainly still among us. We celebrated the life of one of those elders this week as we held the funeral service for Dr. Perce Percefull in the sanctuary on Thursday. Perce had a distinguished career as a caring and extremely competent physician and respected leader among other docs for over 50 years before his retirement. What we said about Perce was that he got his values right. What was important was God, family, his service as a healer and doctor, his service to his community and to his country in World War II as a member, of what Tom Brokaw has rightly called, The Greatest Generation. I will be posting the tributes that his family and I offered to honor Dr. Percefull’s life of service and compassion and joy on the church website this week. I commend those to you as we learn to do what John the Baptizer tells us to learn:

• Get your life in shape.
• Straighten out the crooked parts. 
• Focus on what really matters.
• If you have two coats, give one away. 
• If you have food, share it with those who do not. 
• You know what is right, do it and get yourself out of the way.

Make room, get yourself uncluttered, prepare, not just your homes, but also your hearts so the savior can be born in us again.