Luke
3:1-9
Advent
2
December
9, 2012
William G. Carter
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, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of
God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 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. 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; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him,
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to
yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from
these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax 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.”
Advent signals more than the coming
of Jesus Christ. Advent is the coming of John the Baptist. This strange prophet
calls out from the desert. He is a throw-back to the Old Testament, one more
demanding desert preacher. God gives him a Word to speak that differs from the
emperor, governor, and rulers of the day. John works the region on both sides
of the river, out beyond the cities and the towns. He speaks a Holy Word when
the official religious leaders apparently had little to say.
All the Gospels say the people were
ready for him. Of course, they were ready. When John the Baptist opened his
mouth, God came out. God was on his lips. God was in his voice. And what people
want more than anything else is to be in the presence of God.
I remember when my parents were
invited by some neighbors to go and hear a traveling preacher. My sister and I
were taken along, as I recall. We squeezed into the neighbors’ car, all six of
us, and went over the hills to the country church that our neighbors attended.
I don’t know where it was. I was little. From what I can piece together from
that night, it must have been a revival. The old country folk in that church
needed to be revived.
And when the preacher came out in a
black suit and a glistening brow, he revived as many of those folk as he could.
He worked pretty hard at it. I can’t remember what he said, but I remember he was
loud. He blew our hair straight back. He raised the temperature in the room. I
was just a child, but I remember it was loud and scary – and I didn’t want to
leave.
Luke says there were crowds. Large
numbers of people! They came to be washed by John. He didn’t care who they
were. He didn’t waste any time reading their resumes. John yelled at whoever showed
up. ‘Who do you think you are, to show your face or tout your credentials?” he
screamed. “Do you think God is going to give you a free pass to glory? Oh no,
it’s not free. It’s going to cost you everything!”
And with that, the people came. They wanted
to be in the presence of somebody who took God seriously. They wanted somebody
who could cut through the nonsense and talk about something real. They came out
to experience John the Baptist because it was just like experiencing God.
Now, I hesitate to say much about
this. We are a long way from John. We sit on cushioned seats in a
temperature-controlled room. Our music is well rehearsed. Everybody looks so
respectable. This is such a contrast from John’s sanctuary! In the desert there
are no seats and certainly no thermostats. There was no music other than the scream
of animals and the cry of human hearts. John spoke in such a situation of
extremity. We can speak of him only from a distance. We are a long way from his
desert.
But maybe not. Advent invites us to
close the gap, to reflect on the same human hunger to experience God. When I
consider John the Baptist and his habitat, I remember a few lines from poet
T.S. Eliot. He knew there are many sorts of deserts in life, and some of them have nothing to do with
sandy wastes and scorching sun. The poet says,
You neglect and
belittle the desert.
The desert is not
remote in southern tropics
The desert is not
only around the corner,
The desert is
squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in
the heart of your brother.[1]
The barrenness is just that close.
The howling wind, the wild exposure, the rawness of the elements – it is all
right here, so close to so many of us. Every human heart knows the desert.
A few years ago, I felt the tug to spend
a little desert time. A plane ticket took me to Albuquerque, a bus took me to
Santa Fe, and a borrowed car took me to a red rock canyon. There is a monastery
in the canyon, thirteen miles from nowhere. I wanted to know: what does it mean
to go to the desert? To confront the barren wasteland that is all too familiar?
I asked the brothers in the monastery; they smiled and kept their vow of
silence. They waited a week before any of them said a word. They watched to see
if I was serious – or if I was merely a tourist passing through.
On my final day, they told me what
they gave up to go to the desert. One of them had been an engineer. He gave up a
job researching solar energy in a laboratory. Another left behind a career as
the development director of a major arts organization. A third didn’t really
have a job, he said, just drifted from one employment to another, and the impulse
to join the desert monastery seemed to set him free from years of fumbling from
one meaningless job to another. The engineer spoke up and said, “I was very
good at my job, but the stress was killing me.” The development officer said, “I
raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for my organization, but it left me empty
and hollow.”
All of them gave up lives that had
become numb, empty, and suffocating. Each one moved away from a life that
paying very well but killing them in the process. They walked away – to seek
life together in the desert. They pray, they share the chores, and they
contribute their skills for the life of their small community.
That’s what came to mind as I
reflected on the words of John the Baptist, “Every tree that does not bear good
fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” It is a real picture from first
century agriculture. A vineyard owner would cull the grapevines that were not
producing fruit by killing them. On the day when vines were to be dressed, the
farmer would visit the field with a sharp axe. He would hack up the vine that produced
nothing, that took up space and soil. It was smothering the other vines, taking
away valuable resources, so it needed to go.
And when I recount the story of those
three monks, they were confessing there was some part of their lives that was
unproductive. It didn’t amount to anything. It was dragging them down. It
needed to go. And that gives me some insight into a very practical way for us
to prepare the way of God to come to us.
For Advent, I suggest that we spend
a little time doing an inventory of our souls. Is there a part of our lives
that is dead and has no use? Maybe it’s an ability that once we had, but we
have let it wither, and all that remains is a faint trace. Or we encounter the young
person who does it far better than we ever could; it may be time to let it go.
Or perhaps it is a memory that
lingers with us. Say, for instance, a picture is fixed in our heads: “This is
how Christmas is supposed to look. This is who should be there. This is how we
are going to decorate. This is how we are going to dress. This is what we are
going to do.” But if we are truthful, Christmas has not been like that for a
number of years. We are hanging onto a memory that does not work anymore; it may
be time to let it go.
Or it might be an opinion that we
hold of ourselves. We look into the mirror to say, “This is who I am, this is
what I am about.” But if we are completely honest, that is not who we
are or what we are about. And it hasn’t been, for a while. A small distortion
has grown to be a delusion, and our reinforced messages are only holding us
hostage. It may be time to let this go.
Or maybe, just maybe, there is some
voice, a tempting voice, that repeats that we are now worthy of the love of God
or the love of anybody else. The desert is a place of testing, of sorting
through the voices that bombard us. Sometimes we may hear the parent or the
teacher or the critic denouncing us, restricting us, reducing us, declaring, “You
are nothing. Nobody loves you. You are a cosmic mistake.” And if you give into
that voice long enough, you will start to believe it. The voice of
self-negation needs to be cut off. We have to let it go.
If Advent calls us to prepare a way for
God to come, it calls us to the honesty of the desert. Is there some deadness
in our branches, some withering piece of our spirit that we simply need to let
go?
Maybe it’s time to let go of the
manufactured holiday. You know, the heavy burden of having to do all the
shopping, go to all the parties, put up all the lights, bake up all the
goodies, hang all the ornaments, send all the cards, get in touch with all the
friends, and maintain all the traditions. Is there some part of this that doesn’t
give us any joy anymore? The old Christmas train carries a lot of freight,
doesn’t it? And if some part of this is smothering us, John the Baptist says, “Let
me get my axe and bring it to that old dead vine.”
Or maybe it’s time to let go of the
incessant spending. I’m the first one to get caught up in it. On Friday
afternoon, I found myself with the first free hours of my week, so I swung into
the parking lot of the Junk Emporium. That’s the name of the store: the Junk
Emporium. It has aisles and aisles of Christmas stuff. I piled my shopping cart
full of stuff that I didn’t want and do not need but planned to give to other
people. I picked up gifts for some friends, a goofy gift for my dad, an even
more ridiculous gift for my mother, and some very special gifts for my
household that do not appear on their wish lists.
I labored to push my laden shopping cart
out the door. It was so full that it was hard to push, and a man had to help me
get the cart over the door frame. Then I realized who he was: he was the bell
ringer from the Salvation Army that I had ignored on my way into the Junk
Emporium. He, in turn, gazed into my loaded shopping cart, and looked up with disappointed
eyes, as if to silently say, “Do you really need all this stuff? I’m ringing
the bell for hungry people here. Do you really need all this stuff?”
Well, I pushed by him without saying a
word, loaded up my sleigh, and flew home. And as I am carrying the bags into my
house, I looked at what I bought, and asked, “Do I really need all this stuff?”
That’s a good question for the
desert. Having a shopping cart full of unnecessary stuff is not the same thing
as being a tree with good fruit. Not at all.
John the Baptist runs the checkpoint
on the road to God. He will not let any casual travelers pass. In fact, he
directs us to the weighing station to check if we are carrying any unnecessary
burdens that we need to drop. God sends John to make us pare down, to push us
to focus, to claim the life that really is life. If there is something that
holds us back from experiencing the simple joy of God, we have to let it go.
I’m thinking of my friend Carlos. He
lives in the desert of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, a town damaged greatly by
the hurricane. The Presbyterian Church that he serves as pastor will be housing
up to thirty-six volunteers a day for the next four years. The volunteers will
be helping that community to rebuild its life.
Carlos is well read. He suggests
that Henry David Thoreau is a
helpful guide for understanding John the Baptist and the call of the desert.
Thoreau wrote a book called Walden, to reflect on some time he spent
living in the Massachusetts desert. Here’s what Thoreau says of his journey:
I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not
learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did
I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like
as to put to rout all that was not life.[2]
Don’t be afraid of the desert. That is where God
meets us.
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