Third Sunday Of Advent
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Object:
Theme For The Day
Feeling holiday stress? The greatest stress comes from the gospel message itself.
Old Testament Lesson
Zephaniah 3:14-20
Rejoice: The King Is In Your Midst
Zephaniah's prophecy dates from more than a century before the Babylonian exile. The foe in this case is Assyria, rather than Babylon, and the cause the prophet is advancing is the Deuteronomic reform. The worst is now over, in the prophet's estimation. God the divine warrior has exacted punishment, and the tide will soon be turning. Jerusalem's sadness will be turned to joy (v. 1). To Jerusalem, Zephaniah proclaims, "The Lord ... will rejoice over you with gladness ... [and] will exult over you with loud singing" (v. 17). The Lord will restore the people's fortunes (v. 20). The message most relevant to Advent is verse 15: "The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more."
New Testament Lesson
Philippians 4:4-7
Rejoice In The Lord Always
The theme of rejoicing from the Old Testament Lesson is picked up here in verse 4: "Rejoice in the Lord always ..." Paul exhorts the people to pray boldly: "in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God" (v. 6). The outcome of prayer is "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding ..." (v. 7). The theme of rejoicing matches the traditional theme of "Gaudete," or "Joy" Sunday -- which, for those churches practicing the purple-and-pink style of Advent wreath, rather than the four blue candles -- is the day when the pentitential purple candle on the Advent wreath is replaced with the joyous pink. Traditionally in the Roman Catholic church, this third Sunday was a minor break in the Advent fast -- an emphasis that has been almost completely lost in most Protestant churches, where only the pink candle survives as a mute and all-but-meaningless reminder.
The Gospel
Luke 3:7-18
One Who Is More Powerful Than I Is Coming
In this passage, John the Baptist establishes his credentials as a fiery prophet after the model of the great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. Calling his crowd of listeners a "brood of vipers," John encourages them to "bear fruits worthy of repentance" (vv. 7-8). Those who refuse to repent will be as brush cut down with the axe and thrown into the fire. In verses 10-14, when the crowds and even the soldiers ask, "What are we to do?" John replies, in classic prophetic fashion, that they are to practice concrete acts of righteousness -- sharing with the poor, practicing fairness in financial affairs, avoiding extortion and oppression. When the people raise messianic expectations with respect to John, he immediately backs off, declaring that one more powerful than he is coming -- he will be the one to wield the figurative "winnowing fork," by which the Lord's judgment will be carried out (v. 17). This passage has both eschatological and messianic themes for Advent.
Preaching Possibilities
This is the time of year when we start to see signs of Christianity appearing in all sorts of unexpected places. Nativity scenes sprout on courthouse lawns. The star that guided the Magi suddenly appears, dangling improbably from a streetlight. "Gloria in excelsis Deo" wafts from the speakers of the car radio. The name of Christ seems to be everywhere, embedded in that larger word, "Christmas." "Christ's Mass," it means, literally -- the name of a worship service, no less!
If you were a visitor from an earlier century, plucked up by some sort of time machine and deposited in North America in the month of December, you might get the wrong idea. You might think that, with the universal excitement about Christ's Mass soon to come, you'd landed in the most religious society on earth. Well, guess again, time-traveler: it's only Christmas! For a great many people who celebrate this holiday, Christmas and religious faith have little to do with one another.
The case could be made that the market -- that massive, huffing-and-puffing engine, pulling the largest consumer economy the world has ever known -- has pretty much co-opted the babe in the manger. "Come, let us go and see this thing that has come to pass" means, for many in our culture, not the birth of Christ but the arrival of Santa at the mall -- or maybe a nighttime drive by some neighbor's house festooned with lights.
In recent years, some people have been trying to make a case for dispensing with the name "Advent." They've come up with a new name for these days leading up to Christmas: the "Sparkle Season."
True, the commercial culture may have kidnapped the baby Jesus (or, at least, sometimes it may seem that way). The holiday marketers may have converted the angels' song into advertising jingles. They may have plastered the image of three kings across hundreds of thousands of greeting cards. But at least there's one person in the Christmas story who remains untouched by commercialism: John the Baptist!
Can you imagine watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and seeing -- between the giant Garfield balloon and some marching band from the midwest -- John the Baptist's float go by? There he'd be, shaggy-haired, wild-eyed, clad in his camel's-hair coat, a wireless microphone in his dirty hand: shouting, "Repent!" (Somehow I don't think he'd be lip-synching.)
Can you picture what John the Baptist's line of Christmas cards might look like? "From our house to yours this holiday season: Merry Christmas ... you brood of vipers!" "Season's greetings to you, from across the miles ... who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" "Let's all pass the wassail cup and gather round the Yule log ... to watch it burn with unquenchable fire!" Not exactly a Hallmark moment, is it?
This is the time of year when people start complaining about holiday stress. Shopping lists grow larger, and bank accounts get smaller. Calendars get filled up, and leisure time drains away. All this mad, frenetic activity seems like a pretty strange way to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace. Already, a great many of us are wishing for an end to the holiday stress.
Yet, the birth of the Messiah brings its own sort of stress. John the Baptist is crystal clear about that. His message is high-stress: "Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
His image comes from the world of agriculture. It was common practice, in John's day, for a vineyard owner to cull the grapevines that were not producing fruit, by killing them. In fact, it was absolutely necessary -- for the good of the overall crop -- to do so. The day the vines were to be cut back, the farmer would come out to the field with a sharp axe. The sight of that axe, leaning up against one of the grapevines as the farmer inspected it, was a sure sign of what was soon to come. "Bear fruit worthy of repentance!" John proclaims. If you do not, you will end up like one of those shattered, barren grapevines -- good for nothing but to serve as fuel for the fire!
The people to whom John is directing these harsh words are the very people who have come out to be baptized by him (talk about driving away your customers!). We'd like to think that John, as a man of God, is hospitable to all comers -- at least to those who approach him with sincerity in their hearts. Evidently, that isn't true of these people. His implication is that this group has come for other reasons. Maybe they've come to check John out, and report back to the authorities back in Jerusalem. Or maybe they've come as some kind of spiritual tourists, looking to add this latest religious experience to all the others depicted in their photo albums.
Whatever their deception, John sees right through it. He refuses to be taken in by those who would subvert his baptism for their own purposes. John knows that, at the heart of his simple ritual of bathing in the river, there is nothing less than an encounter with the living God. Woe to those who take such an encounter lightly!
By this time, John's become quite a religious phenomenon. On the gauge that measures his fifteen minutes of fame, John's needle is now pointing to 7.5. Spiritual seekers are flocking to see him, from miles around. They weep, they wail, they pray, they repent. When John takes them, one by one, into his hairy arms and lowers them down into the rushing, flood-swollen river, they burst up a moment later, gasping for air -- believing that the love of God, like some searing, white-hot flame, has burned away all that is evil in their lives.
So who wants a John the Baptist Christmas, anyway? Many of us spend our time, in these stressful December weeks, putting ourselves through the grinder -- all for the ultimate goal of preparing, for ourselves and those we love, a perfect Yuletide celebration of peace and joy. Do we really want to approach the manger with the words, "You brood of vipers!" ringing in our ears?
We really have no other choice -- because, when it comes right down to it, the true meaning of Christmas is not "sleep in heavenly peace," but "rise up and follow." The true song of the season is not a lullaby, but a battle cry. The one whose coming we celebrate is the Savior of the world -- not because he slept in a manger, but because he bled and died on a cross. There is much to celebrate in the brightness and the beauty -- and yes, even the sparkle -- of this season: But we all have to struggle, each year, to remind ourselves that Jesus came not to bless our world as it is, but to transform it into what God intends it to be.
Prayer For The Day
O God, whose deepest desire for this world is justice for the poor
and peace for those who suffer:
may the urgent voice of the one crying in the wilderness
penetrate our hardened hearts.
Faced with the coming of the one he announces --
the one who baptizes with Holy-Spirit fire --
may our complacency give way to conversion
and our pleasure seeking be replaced by zeal for justice.
We ask this through the one whose coming is certain,
whose day draws near:
your Son Jesus, our Lord.
Amen.
To Illustrate
In October 1989, the city of San Francisco was struck by a powerful earthquake. Huge cracks appeared in the walls of Candlestick Park, where thousands of fans were waiting to watch the third game of the World Series. Sections of freeway twisted and buckled; some collapsed. At least 27 fires broke out across the city. The largest, in the Marina District, consumed dozens of buildings.
At the edge of the Marina District, a crowd of curiosity seekers gathered, watching the firefighters as they battled the flames. After a few minutes of this, a police officer came up to the crowd and began shouting at them. "What have you come to look at?" he said to them. "This is no time to be standing around. There's been an earthquake. You all have work to do! Go home. Fill your bathtubs with water (if you still have water). Prepare yourselves to live for the next several days without electricity. The sun's going to set in another hour. Your time is running out. The firefighters will do their job here: now you go home and do yours!"
That police officer spoke truth, as John the Baptist spoke truth. He spoke with urgency, as John the Baptist spoke with urgency. His message, like John's, was what the people truly needed to hear.
***
How do we deal with holiday stress? There are many answers from the world of stress management -- all good advice about taking care of our health, getting enough sleep, doing centering exercises, and all the rest. There's but one biblical answer, though -- and it is at once both simple and difficult. That answer is: focus on the one true thing. The one true thing is the good news at the very heart of Christmas: the birth of Jesus Christ, God's Son, into the world. Everything else about the holiday -- all those secular celebrations that demand so much time and energy -- are as nothing, compared to that good news.
Several years ago, there was a flurry of attention centering around a question that purported to be new, but in fact was very old: the question, "What would Jesus do?" There's a holiday variation to that. When the shopping and the baking and the decorating and the partying all get to be too much, we can always try asking ourselves the question, "How would Jesus celebrate?"
We might even try a variation on the variation. Instead of asking, "How would Jesus celebrate?" -- because, after all, he's the reason for the celebration -- we might try asking ourselves how another key person in the Christmas story might respond to the holiday hype all around us: "How would Mary celebrate?" Luke's Gospel supplies an answer to that question: in response to all the glorious things the shepherds tell her about what they heard and saw on the hillside, Luke tells us Mary "treasured these words and pondered them in her heart" (2:19).
During Advent, may we find the one thing that is worth treasuring in our hearts: Jesus Christ. His coming, as John reminds us, is not all sweetness and light. The Son of God is born into the world not in order to bless its brokenness, but to heal it. As anyone who's been through a lengthy recovery period can attest, healing can be difficult, demanding, and at times even painful. But it's the only way that leads to life.
***
The Greek philosopher, Plato, employs a famous image: one that has become known to generations of Philosophy 101 students ever since as "the Cave of Ignorance." Plato describes how we human beings live our lives as prisoners, who are chained facing the blank wall a cave. The only light inside that dark cave comes from a fire blazing behind us. All we can see are the shadows on the cave wall.
Because of our limited vision, we take those dancing shadows for reality. Finally, in Plato's allegory of the cave, one prisoner escapes from his chains. He staggers out of the cave, and for the first time lays eyes on the real world. The word Plato employs to describe his change of perspective is metanoia -- the same word the New Testament translates, "repentance."
Plato believes only a small number of people in this world ever leave the cave of ignorance, and see things as they really are. He points out how easily we grow accustomed to living in the darkness. Those shadows are our reality, and we laugh cynically at anyone who suggests that there could be something more to life.
"Repent!" cries John the Baptist. Break free of the chains that bind you. Leave the cave of ignorance and sin!
***
Woe to an age when the voices of those who cry in the wilderness have fallen silent, outshouted by the noise of the day or outlawed or swallowed up in the intoxication of progress, or growing smothered and fainter for fear and cowardice. The devastation will soon be so terrifying and universal that the word "wilderness" will again strike our hearts and minds. I think we know that.
But still there are no crying voices to raise their plaint and accusation. Not for an hour can life dispense with these John-the-Baptist characters, these original individuals, struck by the lightning of mission and vocation. Their heart goes before them, and that is why their eye is so clear-sighted, their judgment so incorruptible. They do not cry for the sake of crying or for the sake of the voice or because they begrudge earth's pleasant hours, exiled as they themselves are from the small, warm companionships of the foreground. Theirs is the great comfort known only to those who have paced out the inmost and furthermost boundaries of existence.
They cry for blessing and salvation. They summon us to our last chance, while already they feel the ground quaking and the rafters creaking and see the firmest of mountains tottering inwardly and see the very stars in heaven hanging in peril. They summon us to the opportunity of warding off, by the greater power of a converted heart, the shifting desert that will pounce upon us and bury us.
O Lord, today we know once more, and in quite practical terms, what it means to clear away the rubble and make paths smooth again. We will have to know it and do it for years to come. Let the crying voices ring out, pointing out the wilderness and overcoming the devastation from within. May the Advent figure of John, the relentless envoy and prophet in God's name, be no stranger in our wilderness of ruins. For how shall we hear unless someone cries out above the tumult and destruction and delusion?
-- Alfred Delp (Delp was a Jesuit priest, condemned by the Nazis as a traitor for his opposition to Hitler. He wrote this piece in prison, shortly before he was hanged in 1945.)
***
The chief biblical analogy for baptism is not the water that washes but the flood that drowns. Discipleship is more than turning over a new leaf. It is more fitful and disorderly than gradual moral formation. Nothing less than daily, often painful, lifelong death will do. So Paul seems to know not whether to call what happened to him on the Damascus Road "birth" or "death" -- it felt like both at the same time.
In all this, I hear the simple assertion that we must submit to change if we would be formed into this cruciform faith. We may come singing "Just As I Am," but we will not stay by being our same old selves. The needs of the world are too great, the suffering and pain too extensive, the lures of the world too seductive for us to begin to change the world unless we are changed, unless conversion of life and morals becomes our pattern. The status quo is too alluring. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the six-thirty news, our institutions, theologies, and politics. The only way we shall break its hold on us is to be transferred to another dominion, to be cut loose from our old certainties, to be thrust under the flood and then pulled forth fresh and newborn. Baptism takes us there.
On the bank of some dark river, as we are thrust backward, onlookers will remark, "They could kill somebody like that." To which old John might say, "Good, you're finally catching on."
-- William Willimon, "Repent," from On a Wild and Windy Mountain and 25 Other Meditations for the Christmas Year (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984)
Feeling holiday stress? The greatest stress comes from the gospel message itself.
Old Testament Lesson
Zephaniah 3:14-20
Rejoice: The King Is In Your Midst
Zephaniah's prophecy dates from more than a century before the Babylonian exile. The foe in this case is Assyria, rather than Babylon, and the cause the prophet is advancing is the Deuteronomic reform. The worst is now over, in the prophet's estimation. God the divine warrior has exacted punishment, and the tide will soon be turning. Jerusalem's sadness will be turned to joy (v. 1). To Jerusalem, Zephaniah proclaims, "The Lord ... will rejoice over you with gladness ... [and] will exult over you with loud singing" (v. 17). The Lord will restore the people's fortunes (v. 20). The message most relevant to Advent is verse 15: "The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more."
New Testament Lesson
Philippians 4:4-7
Rejoice In The Lord Always
The theme of rejoicing from the Old Testament Lesson is picked up here in verse 4: "Rejoice in the Lord always ..." Paul exhorts the people to pray boldly: "in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God" (v. 6). The outcome of prayer is "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding ..." (v. 7). The theme of rejoicing matches the traditional theme of "Gaudete," or "Joy" Sunday -- which, for those churches practicing the purple-and-pink style of Advent wreath, rather than the four blue candles -- is the day when the pentitential purple candle on the Advent wreath is replaced with the joyous pink. Traditionally in the Roman Catholic church, this third Sunday was a minor break in the Advent fast -- an emphasis that has been almost completely lost in most Protestant churches, where only the pink candle survives as a mute and all-but-meaningless reminder.
The Gospel
Luke 3:7-18
One Who Is More Powerful Than I Is Coming
In this passage, John the Baptist establishes his credentials as a fiery prophet after the model of the great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. Calling his crowd of listeners a "brood of vipers," John encourages them to "bear fruits worthy of repentance" (vv. 7-8). Those who refuse to repent will be as brush cut down with the axe and thrown into the fire. In verses 10-14, when the crowds and even the soldiers ask, "What are we to do?" John replies, in classic prophetic fashion, that they are to practice concrete acts of righteousness -- sharing with the poor, practicing fairness in financial affairs, avoiding extortion and oppression. When the people raise messianic expectations with respect to John, he immediately backs off, declaring that one more powerful than he is coming -- he will be the one to wield the figurative "winnowing fork," by which the Lord's judgment will be carried out (v. 17). This passage has both eschatological and messianic themes for Advent.
Preaching Possibilities
This is the time of year when we start to see signs of Christianity appearing in all sorts of unexpected places. Nativity scenes sprout on courthouse lawns. The star that guided the Magi suddenly appears, dangling improbably from a streetlight. "Gloria in excelsis Deo" wafts from the speakers of the car radio. The name of Christ seems to be everywhere, embedded in that larger word, "Christmas." "Christ's Mass," it means, literally -- the name of a worship service, no less!
If you were a visitor from an earlier century, plucked up by some sort of time machine and deposited in North America in the month of December, you might get the wrong idea. You might think that, with the universal excitement about Christ's Mass soon to come, you'd landed in the most religious society on earth. Well, guess again, time-traveler: it's only Christmas! For a great many people who celebrate this holiday, Christmas and religious faith have little to do with one another.
The case could be made that the market -- that massive, huffing-and-puffing engine, pulling the largest consumer economy the world has ever known -- has pretty much co-opted the babe in the manger. "Come, let us go and see this thing that has come to pass" means, for many in our culture, not the birth of Christ but the arrival of Santa at the mall -- or maybe a nighttime drive by some neighbor's house festooned with lights.
In recent years, some people have been trying to make a case for dispensing with the name "Advent." They've come up with a new name for these days leading up to Christmas: the "Sparkle Season."
True, the commercial culture may have kidnapped the baby Jesus (or, at least, sometimes it may seem that way). The holiday marketers may have converted the angels' song into advertising jingles. They may have plastered the image of three kings across hundreds of thousands of greeting cards. But at least there's one person in the Christmas story who remains untouched by commercialism: John the Baptist!
Can you imagine watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and seeing -- between the giant Garfield balloon and some marching band from the midwest -- John the Baptist's float go by? There he'd be, shaggy-haired, wild-eyed, clad in his camel's-hair coat, a wireless microphone in his dirty hand: shouting, "Repent!" (Somehow I don't think he'd be lip-synching.)
Can you picture what John the Baptist's line of Christmas cards might look like? "From our house to yours this holiday season: Merry Christmas ... you brood of vipers!" "Season's greetings to you, from across the miles ... who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" "Let's all pass the wassail cup and gather round the Yule log ... to watch it burn with unquenchable fire!" Not exactly a Hallmark moment, is it?
This is the time of year when people start complaining about holiday stress. Shopping lists grow larger, and bank accounts get smaller. Calendars get filled up, and leisure time drains away. All this mad, frenetic activity seems like a pretty strange way to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace. Already, a great many of us are wishing for an end to the holiday stress.
Yet, the birth of the Messiah brings its own sort of stress. John the Baptist is crystal clear about that. His message is high-stress: "Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
His image comes from the world of agriculture. It was common practice, in John's day, for a vineyard owner to cull the grapevines that were not producing fruit, by killing them. In fact, it was absolutely necessary -- for the good of the overall crop -- to do so. The day the vines were to be cut back, the farmer would come out to the field with a sharp axe. The sight of that axe, leaning up against one of the grapevines as the farmer inspected it, was a sure sign of what was soon to come. "Bear fruit worthy of repentance!" John proclaims. If you do not, you will end up like one of those shattered, barren grapevines -- good for nothing but to serve as fuel for the fire!
The people to whom John is directing these harsh words are the very people who have come out to be baptized by him (talk about driving away your customers!). We'd like to think that John, as a man of God, is hospitable to all comers -- at least to those who approach him with sincerity in their hearts. Evidently, that isn't true of these people. His implication is that this group has come for other reasons. Maybe they've come to check John out, and report back to the authorities back in Jerusalem. Or maybe they've come as some kind of spiritual tourists, looking to add this latest religious experience to all the others depicted in their photo albums.
Whatever their deception, John sees right through it. He refuses to be taken in by those who would subvert his baptism for their own purposes. John knows that, at the heart of his simple ritual of bathing in the river, there is nothing less than an encounter with the living God. Woe to those who take such an encounter lightly!
By this time, John's become quite a religious phenomenon. On the gauge that measures his fifteen minutes of fame, John's needle is now pointing to 7.5. Spiritual seekers are flocking to see him, from miles around. They weep, they wail, they pray, they repent. When John takes them, one by one, into his hairy arms and lowers them down into the rushing, flood-swollen river, they burst up a moment later, gasping for air -- believing that the love of God, like some searing, white-hot flame, has burned away all that is evil in their lives.
So who wants a John the Baptist Christmas, anyway? Many of us spend our time, in these stressful December weeks, putting ourselves through the grinder -- all for the ultimate goal of preparing, for ourselves and those we love, a perfect Yuletide celebration of peace and joy. Do we really want to approach the manger with the words, "You brood of vipers!" ringing in our ears?
We really have no other choice -- because, when it comes right down to it, the true meaning of Christmas is not "sleep in heavenly peace," but "rise up and follow." The true song of the season is not a lullaby, but a battle cry. The one whose coming we celebrate is the Savior of the world -- not because he slept in a manger, but because he bled and died on a cross. There is much to celebrate in the brightness and the beauty -- and yes, even the sparkle -- of this season: But we all have to struggle, each year, to remind ourselves that Jesus came not to bless our world as it is, but to transform it into what God intends it to be.
Prayer For The Day
O God, whose deepest desire for this world is justice for the poor
and peace for those who suffer:
may the urgent voice of the one crying in the wilderness
penetrate our hardened hearts.
Faced with the coming of the one he announces --
the one who baptizes with Holy-Spirit fire --
may our complacency give way to conversion
and our pleasure seeking be replaced by zeal for justice.
We ask this through the one whose coming is certain,
whose day draws near:
your Son Jesus, our Lord.
Amen.
To Illustrate
In October 1989, the city of San Francisco was struck by a powerful earthquake. Huge cracks appeared in the walls of Candlestick Park, where thousands of fans were waiting to watch the third game of the World Series. Sections of freeway twisted and buckled; some collapsed. At least 27 fires broke out across the city. The largest, in the Marina District, consumed dozens of buildings.
At the edge of the Marina District, a crowd of curiosity seekers gathered, watching the firefighters as they battled the flames. After a few minutes of this, a police officer came up to the crowd and began shouting at them. "What have you come to look at?" he said to them. "This is no time to be standing around. There's been an earthquake. You all have work to do! Go home. Fill your bathtubs with water (if you still have water). Prepare yourselves to live for the next several days without electricity. The sun's going to set in another hour. Your time is running out. The firefighters will do their job here: now you go home and do yours!"
That police officer spoke truth, as John the Baptist spoke truth. He spoke with urgency, as John the Baptist spoke with urgency. His message, like John's, was what the people truly needed to hear.
***
How do we deal with holiday stress? There are many answers from the world of stress management -- all good advice about taking care of our health, getting enough sleep, doing centering exercises, and all the rest. There's but one biblical answer, though -- and it is at once both simple and difficult. That answer is: focus on the one true thing. The one true thing is the good news at the very heart of Christmas: the birth of Jesus Christ, God's Son, into the world. Everything else about the holiday -- all those secular celebrations that demand so much time and energy -- are as nothing, compared to that good news.
Several years ago, there was a flurry of attention centering around a question that purported to be new, but in fact was very old: the question, "What would Jesus do?" There's a holiday variation to that. When the shopping and the baking and the decorating and the partying all get to be too much, we can always try asking ourselves the question, "How would Jesus celebrate?"
We might even try a variation on the variation. Instead of asking, "How would Jesus celebrate?" -- because, after all, he's the reason for the celebration -- we might try asking ourselves how another key person in the Christmas story might respond to the holiday hype all around us: "How would Mary celebrate?" Luke's Gospel supplies an answer to that question: in response to all the glorious things the shepherds tell her about what they heard and saw on the hillside, Luke tells us Mary "treasured these words and pondered them in her heart" (2:19).
During Advent, may we find the one thing that is worth treasuring in our hearts: Jesus Christ. His coming, as John reminds us, is not all sweetness and light. The Son of God is born into the world not in order to bless its brokenness, but to heal it. As anyone who's been through a lengthy recovery period can attest, healing can be difficult, demanding, and at times even painful. But it's the only way that leads to life.
***
The Greek philosopher, Plato, employs a famous image: one that has become known to generations of Philosophy 101 students ever since as "the Cave of Ignorance." Plato describes how we human beings live our lives as prisoners, who are chained facing the blank wall a cave. The only light inside that dark cave comes from a fire blazing behind us. All we can see are the shadows on the cave wall.
Because of our limited vision, we take those dancing shadows for reality. Finally, in Plato's allegory of the cave, one prisoner escapes from his chains. He staggers out of the cave, and for the first time lays eyes on the real world. The word Plato employs to describe his change of perspective is metanoia -- the same word the New Testament translates, "repentance."
Plato believes only a small number of people in this world ever leave the cave of ignorance, and see things as they really are. He points out how easily we grow accustomed to living in the darkness. Those shadows are our reality, and we laugh cynically at anyone who suggests that there could be something more to life.
"Repent!" cries John the Baptist. Break free of the chains that bind you. Leave the cave of ignorance and sin!
***
Woe to an age when the voices of those who cry in the wilderness have fallen silent, outshouted by the noise of the day or outlawed or swallowed up in the intoxication of progress, or growing smothered and fainter for fear and cowardice. The devastation will soon be so terrifying and universal that the word "wilderness" will again strike our hearts and minds. I think we know that.
But still there are no crying voices to raise their plaint and accusation. Not for an hour can life dispense with these John-the-Baptist characters, these original individuals, struck by the lightning of mission and vocation. Their heart goes before them, and that is why their eye is so clear-sighted, their judgment so incorruptible. They do not cry for the sake of crying or for the sake of the voice or because they begrudge earth's pleasant hours, exiled as they themselves are from the small, warm companionships of the foreground. Theirs is the great comfort known only to those who have paced out the inmost and furthermost boundaries of existence.
They cry for blessing and salvation. They summon us to our last chance, while already they feel the ground quaking and the rafters creaking and see the firmest of mountains tottering inwardly and see the very stars in heaven hanging in peril. They summon us to the opportunity of warding off, by the greater power of a converted heart, the shifting desert that will pounce upon us and bury us.
O Lord, today we know once more, and in quite practical terms, what it means to clear away the rubble and make paths smooth again. We will have to know it and do it for years to come. Let the crying voices ring out, pointing out the wilderness and overcoming the devastation from within. May the Advent figure of John, the relentless envoy and prophet in God's name, be no stranger in our wilderness of ruins. For how shall we hear unless someone cries out above the tumult and destruction and delusion?
-- Alfred Delp (Delp was a Jesuit priest, condemned by the Nazis as a traitor for his opposition to Hitler. He wrote this piece in prison, shortly before he was hanged in 1945.)
***
The chief biblical analogy for baptism is not the water that washes but the flood that drowns. Discipleship is more than turning over a new leaf. It is more fitful and disorderly than gradual moral formation. Nothing less than daily, often painful, lifelong death will do. So Paul seems to know not whether to call what happened to him on the Damascus Road "birth" or "death" -- it felt like both at the same time.
In all this, I hear the simple assertion that we must submit to change if we would be formed into this cruciform faith. We may come singing "Just As I Am," but we will not stay by being our same old selves. The needs of the world are too great, the suffering and pain too extensive, the lures of the world too seductive for us to begin to change the world unless we are changed, unless conversion of life and morals becomes our pattern. The status quo is too alluring. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the six-thirty news, our institutions, theologies, and politics. The only way we shall break its hold on us is to be transferred to another dominion, to be cut loose from our old certainties, to be thrust under the flood and then pulled forth fresh and newborn. Baptism takes us there.
On the bank of some dark river, as we are thrust backward, onlookers will remark, "They could kill somebody like that." To which old John might say, "Good, you're finally catching on."
-- William Willimon, "Repent," from On a Wild and Windy Mountain and 25 Other Meditations for the Christmas Year (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984)
