December 6, 2009 Sermon

Advent II, A Pilgrimage Toward Peace(Malachi 3: 1-4; Luke 3: 1-6)

Rev. Sally Harris

O God of peace, teach us how to prepare for the coming of Christ. Amen.

This advent we are following the lectionary readings. Readings that are organized into a three-year cycle : Year A, B, and C. The year C cycle began last Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, which means most of our gospel lessons this year will be from Luke. Both the Hebrew and Christian lectionaries developed over the centuries. So today we share our readings with worshiping communities around the world.  Typically, a lectionary will go through the scriptures in a logical pattern. Sometimes it is hard to see the logic between the readings on any given Sunday but not today. Today the connection between the Hebrew reading and the gospel reading is amazing.  You see Malachi was Israel's last prophet. This book is placed last in the Old Testament. It was written about a hundred years after the exiles had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, around 450 BC.

After Malachi there was over a 400 year prophetic silence. That long period of silence was finally broken with the first prophet of the New Testament period, John the Baptist. And so our readings this morning bridge the prophetic tradition of the last Old Testament prophet with the first New Testament prophet, John the Baptist. Interestingly enough, Luke does not write for a Christian century. Luke does not count time from the birth of Jesus. Instead, he reckons the years from the advent of Tiberius as emperor. It was, Luke tells us, in the 15th year of this Caesar's reign that "the word of God came. After naming Rome's political powers both great and small, Luke then identifies Jerusalem's religious establishment; the story takes place "during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas." Luke, in a chronicle replete with these people and places, seems to be saying that when "the Word of God came" it really came. It came all the way into this world; it came into our world, the world of political, economic and religious power, the world of the Caesars.

Of course, for his subjects, Caesar’s word was God’s word. Herod’s word was God’s word in Galilee. Even Caiaphas’s word had a divine ring to it. Of course, people muttered, "They shouldn’t play God." But such rulers had been playing God for millennia. They’d been deciding who lives and who dies from the beginning. Our own clever deities peer from places of power. A thumb turns, a head nods, an eyebrow rises, and you too are history: your livelihood, your loved ones, your reputation, your life swept away in a second. That’s the way it was -- and is. The gods decree, and you are gone. So, like us, John and his cousin, Jesus, died subject to the de facto deities whose word was -- and is -- the law.

Luke is no fool. He renders to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Caesar does mark our days and tell us the time. A Christian calendar with its Christian centuries is not a Lucan passion. So when Luke announces that "the word of God came," it comes in the 15th year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius; it comes down to this tough turf where the reigning gods number our days.

Yet after this apparent deference to Caesar, Luke begins to render to God a record and a reckoning that no Caesar could foresee. When "the word of God came," it did not come from imperial Rome or from Israel's religious establishment in the temple.

God's word to all humanity came from a wild and wooly man who lived in the deep of the desert, on the fringes of society rather than in its corridors of power, at the periphery rather than at the epicenter. The divine messenger and his message originated in an unlikely place and from an improbable source.  John would have been easy to ignore if you expected or wanted something normal, safe, or traditional.  But neither John nor his message was normal by any stretch of the imagination.

This Advent, I’ve tried to imagine how John the Baptist, this locust-and-wild-honey-eating, camel-hair-wearing prophet, prepared for his pilgrimage of preaching in the wilderness. How, I wonder, did John make himself ready? No doubt he had to straighten the paths within himself and smooth out all that was rough in his interior landscape before he had the courage to do the work that God had called him to do. He must have known his message was radical – on the fringe. He must have had an inkling there would be consequences to disturbing the status quo.

I wonder, how did John make himself ready?

The readings of the Advent season call us to attend to and prepare our inner terrain so that we may welcome Christ in our lives, in our church and in our world. There is preparatory groundwork for a pilgrimage toward peace. And so in this season of preparation, Malachi and John challenge us to consider: amidst the complexities and complications of our lives, is there something we need to do to make it easier for Christ to enter our terrain and to be known in this world? Is there some path through our souls that need to be straightened; smoothed? Is there some mountainous obstacle that needs to be lowered— so that Christ may meet less resistance within us? What is polluting our spiritual filters so that we cannot behold the word of God in the most unlikely places?

Today is the Advent Sunday of peace. How do we as individuals prepare for a pilgrimage toward peace? What needs to be acknowledged? What needs to be let go? What shapes our movement towards peace, what blocks us from finding the paths of peace within and without?

Every Advent we are reminded that God’s peace is negotiated by those in the wilderness, those in the valley, those on the fringe, on the margins, those whose strength is in their song of protest. Year after year we remember the messengers of peace who dared to imagine…

Can we prepare to be one of them? [resource: J. F. Kay]

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