One figure whom I never find in nativity scenes is John the Baptist. True enough, John didn’t gather with Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds in that Bethlehem stable. But neither did the three kings, and still they always manage to make an appearance in our miniature re-creations.
Without fail, however, John shows up in our Scripture readings for Advent. All four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--begin the story of Jesus’ life and ministry by telling us about this baptizing prophet who was sent to prepare the way for Jesus. Luke, who is our guide for this year’s Advent season, doubles the emphasis on John’s importance by telling John’s birth story alongside that of Jesus. We hear almost as much about Elizabeth, Zechariah, and their miracle baby John as we do about Mary, Joseph, and the truly miraculous birth of Jesus. We can’t read and hear all these stories without getting the feeling that there must be something important about John’s ministry of preparation for those of us who follow Jesus.
This evening C and I plan to set up our Christmas tree. We might hang some Christmas lights up in the window. We definitely will take out the shoebox that holds our Nativity Set.
Every year I look forward to unwrapping the simple wooden characters from their newspaper and reenacting the Christmas story with them. The angel will stand over an empty manger near the tree. Mary, Joseph, and a donkey will begin their long journey toward Bethlehem, probably on a bookshelf across the room. The shepherds will be watching their sheep on a windowsill, and the wise men will be off in another room, looking for their star. Step by step, all will make their way across the room toward the manger scene where the Christ Child will be born.
One figure whom I never find in nativity scenes is John the Baptist. True enough, John didn’t gather with Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds in that Bethlehem stable. But neither did the three kings, and still they always manage to make an appearance in our miniature re-creations.
Without fail, however, John shows up in our Scripture readings for Advent. All four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--begin the story of Jesus’ life and ministry by telling us about this baptizing prophet who was sent to prepare the way for Jesus. Luke, who is our guide for this year’s Advent season, doubles the emphasis on John’s importance by telling John’s birth story alongside that of Jesus. We hear almost as much about Elizabeth, Zechariah, and their miracle baby John as we do about Mary, Joseph, and the truly miraculous birth of Jesus. We can’t read and hear all these stories without getting the feeling that there must be something important about John’s ministry of preparation for those of us who follow Jesus.
Last week C told us that the very act of waiting for something with hope changes and transforms us. The message for us today, I believe, is that we need to change: we need to change in order to be ready to receive Jesus and all he brings to us at Christmas.
The message that we need to change, that we need to prepare, may not immediately strike us as keeping with Christmas spirit. Christmas is supposed to be a time of gift-giving. Some of us will go to all sorts of extremes to find just the right gift for the people we love. We’ll face crowds and long lines, sometimes multiple trips to different stores, not to mention crazy driving. At our best, our motivation in this isn’t a sense of obligation; it’s not that people have earned the right to expect a gift from us. No, when things are at their best, we give gifts out of the sheer joy of giving something nice to someone we love.
God gives in the same way. Every good gift God gives us--especially Jesus--comes from God’s eternally loving heart. God delights in watching us unwrap and try out the good things God gives us. God is like a parent or a grandparent or an aunt or uncle, smiling laughing as a child or grandchild or niece or nephew tears the holiday paper off the package to find the toy or treat waiting inside. In fact, in the original Greek of the New Testament, the word for “grace” is also one of the words for “gift.” God gives away grace with joy simply because God loves us, never because we’ve earned it.
Nevertheless scripture tells us we need to prepare to receive the gift, the grace that God’s given us. This isn’t a message that we need to somehow win God’s blessings by leading sinless lives or by performing heroic good deeds. John the Baptist in our passage today doesn’t say, “Be good and say your prayers, and then maybe God will come down the chimney and fill your stockings and leave presents underneath the Christmas tree.” He doesn’t say God gives presents only to the good boys and girls.
No, God isn’t like that. Instead, John’s message is something like this: Christmas is coming, whether you’re ready for it or not. So best get ready.
Now if I’m honest, this season often catches me by surprise. While some stores have been selling Christmas decorations since September, I always find myself struggling to get the decorations up by Christmas Eve and to get gifts for my family members to the post office in time. I remember many Christmas Eves spent racing against the stores’ closing times to find gifts for my sisters and brother and parents. Some families have a tradition of decorating the tree on Christmas Eve. My family didn’t. But still we always seemed only to get around to trimming the tree on the night before Christmas.
I wasn’t prepared for Christmas. The house wasn’t set up for a celebration. The stockings were not hung by the fire care. Busy schedules, full of Christmas plays, band concerts, and work parties, kept me running too fast to prepare a place to celebrate Jesus’ arrival.
The first passage I want us to meditate on this morning is from Luke, ch 3, vv 1-6. Here John the Baptist appears twenty-five or thirty years after that first Christmas night. He is an adult, but his message remains an Advent message: Prepare for Jesus’ arrival. Listen to how Luke introduces his message in these verses.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan River, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.God gave John a message. It was a message about repentance, about sins that needed to be forgiven. Luke tells us that when John began preaching this message, he somehow fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy about a messenger preparing the way for God to come and save God’s people from everyone and everything that afflicted them. You can read the entire prophecy in Isaiah ch 40.
As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, “The voice of one shouting in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley will be filled, and every mountain and hill will be brought low, and the crooked will be made straight, and the rough places will be made smooth, and all humanity will see the salvation of God.’”
Salvation is a pretty good gift. In fact, I can’t think of a better present to unwrap. You’d think that everyone would be ready to get this kind of gift. But that’s not the case. Sometimes things get in the way, they keep us from recognizing God’s gift as something we’d want. To use the Isaiah language Luke quotes, we run into roadblocks and detours, flat tires and engine trouble and maps with bad directions. For one reason or another, the highway to salvation sometimes is impassable for us.
John’s response to these various roadblocks to salvation is to call people to repent. It turns out there are two kinds of obstacles that come between us and God’s good gift. The first kind of obstacle is internal, its the sort of barrier we construct for ourselves.
Let’s say God was coming over for Christmas dinner, bringing all the blessings of salvation with him. We get the phone call, open the email, find the note in our mailbox. Sometimes we make ourselves so busy with other activities and responsibilities that we aren’t home when God knocks on the door. Our hears, as well as our schedules, become so cluttered with concerns about making a living, with Christmas shopping, with our personal goals and fears, grudges and desires, that there’s no room for God to bring us salvation. In parable you might remember, Jesus says that our hearts can be like a garden overgrown thorns and weeds that leave no room for the gospel of salvation to take root and bear fruit.
“Repent!” John says. Repentance means changing our behavior. Instead of building more barriers between us and God’s salvation, we need to begin tearing them down. If we were to read on to vv 7 through 18, we hear some of the very specific actions John prescribed for those who heard him. To the tax collectors, for example, he said repentance would mean that they no longer cheat people out of their money. Cheating people was a roadblock they had set between themselves and God’s salvation. If God were to get through to them to deliver this great gift, they’d have to stop making the way so difficult. John’s good news is that if we begin this demolition process, God forgives us. God loves us so much that God still wants to come to us and bring us salvation.
But there’s a second kind of roadblock. It’s not one we set up; it’s one other people throw in our path. To use our Christmas dinner analogy, sometimes things come between us and a good Christmas that we have no control over. God let’s us know that he plans to stop by on Christmas day, but sickness shows up first, and here it’s Christmas and we’re in the hospital. It’s Christmas day, and our employer won’t give us the day off. It’s Christmas, but we live in Damascus in Syria, and artillery shells and stray bullets and a civil war rule out any celebration. Perhaps we’re held hostage by grief at the loss of a spouse, a parent, a child. Or maybe Christmas dinner is ruined by strained family relations, a bitter cousin or an abusive father.
I use Christmas illustrations this morning, but John’s message is for all seasons of the year. Both in July as well as in December, we run into habits, events, and situations that work to shut God out of our lives. When it’s something we have some measure, let’s say a secret bitterness or personal grudge that we hang on to, we need to heed John’s prophetic command: “Salvation is coming! Repent! Get ready for it to arrive!”
But what are we to do when the barriers are completely beyond our control? How are we supposed to get ready for salvation when the cancer comes back, when our friend is in the hospital, when our hours are reduced at work, when the money barely stretches to cover heat and food, let alone Christmas celebrations? All these things seem to come between God and us; they keep us from truly enjoying the great gift that Jesus was born to bring us.
I tend to talk about salvation in rather expansive terms. This is a change for me. When I was younger, being saved by Jesus meant being saved from the eternal consequences of my sins. Jesus was born to one day die on a cross so I could get out of hell. To a certain extent, I had the right idea: Jesus did come to save me from my sins. But this is like looking at salvation through a pinhole. It’s one small snippet of a much greater story. Jesus was born on Christmas morning to save us all from much more than hell.
Earlier this morning we heard another passage from Luke that looked at salvation through a different lens. The Bible gives us many ways to look at how God saves us through Jesus and what God is saving us from and what God is saving us for. The Bible gives us many reasons why Jesus was born, why he lived and died and rose again.
Many of us are probably familiar with Bible passages that describe Jesus as a sacrifice offered to God to atone for humanity’s many sins. That God accepts Jesus perfect sacrifice and then gives us forgiveness. But the Bible also tells other stories about Jesus. Sometimes he’s described as a warrior, vanquishing Satan, death, sickness, and oppression. Other times, Jesus is described as a peacemaker, a reconciler. He gets people separated by long histories of bitter disagreement and injury to sit down at the same table, to forgive each other and love each other once again. That’s what Jesus did for God and humans, but he also worked peace between humans who used to be at odds with one another, both at cultural and national levels as well as in our families and homes.
We could go on and on. The Bible richly describes from all sorts of angles the good gift that God gives to us through Jesus. Salvation is freedom from sin, freedom from death; it’s the life of God given back to humanity after Adam gave it up in the Garden; it’s Jesus’ teaching about how to lead holy lives before God. Salvation is a gift that keeps on giving.
In Luke 1, vv 68 through 79, the Bible says that Jesus came to save God’s people from the enemies and overlords who made their lives barely livable. In this passage, John’s father, Zechariah praises God with a beautiful song in this passage. John has just been born, and full of the Holy Spirit, Zechariah sees that John will help prepare the way for God’s salvation. Listen to how his praise song begins:
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,Zechariah praises God because salvation means that God’s people won’t need to fear their enemies any longer. In the first half of his song you hear the words “salvation” and “enemies” as well as the theme of deliverance over and over again. Salvation, according to this bit of scripture, means being rescued from one’s enemies so that one can serve God. Salvation means freedom and peace.
for he has visited his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David
(just as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets long ago),
salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us,
to show mercy to our ancestors
and to remember his holy covenant,
the oath he swore to our ancestor Abraham:
namely that, having been delivered from the hands and fear of our enemies,
we would serve in piety and righteousness before him all of our days. (68-75)
Zechariah’s people had enemies. John’s father Zechariah was a Jewish priest. The Jewish people were an occupied people. The Romans, under Tiberius Caesar, were the most recent in a long series of empires that conquered their land, dethroned their leaders, and taxed them and terrorized them. Periodically their conquerors would reassert their power and right as rulers with demonstrations of senseless violence, making very clear to the common people who was in charge. The Jewish people needed God to deliver them once again; they needed salvation.
Enemies and oppressors are the second kind of roadblock; they are barriers that other people and institutions construct between us and God. There not a lot we can do to clear them out of the way on our own.
Some people in Zechariah’s day thought that maybe they could bulldoze their Roman oppressors out of the way through armed rebellions and civil wars. They’d put all their hope in this or that new revolutionary leader. They’d dress up their cause in rhetoric about purifying their temple of the influence of the pagan overlords. These attempts to work salvation for themselves, to win peace on their own, inevitably ended up in a mass graves of would-be revolutionaries and bodies hung on Roman crosses along the roadways as a warning to others about what happens when you mess with Rome.
Zechariah doesn’t place his hope in a new freedom fighter. No, he sings this song as he looks down on his eight-day old infant son. Listen to how his song ends:
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High,His newborn son would be the prophet who would prepare the way for God to come to them, for God to bring the gift of salvation, the gift of peace from enemies. Zechariah prophesied that the Sun of God’s salvation was rising. We might say, “Christmas is coming.”
For you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give his people knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of their sins.
Through the tender compassion of our God, the rising Sun will visit us from highest heaven,
to shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet in the way of peace. (76-79).
When we run into roadblocks that we ourselves have set up on the highway to salvation, we need to repent. We need to take out our crowbars and sledgehammers and clear the way for God to come to us. We need to bulldoze away the bitterness or the fears that the block road between God and us. They spoil relationships and rob us of joy anyway. They aren’t doing us any good. We need to knock out the foundations of our cherished bad habits. If our drinking or hours spent at the office or anger is out of control, it’s time to repent, it’s time to change. Ask friends to keep you accountable. Tell them to get after you about your bad habits.
But when we find the second kind of barrier blocking the way, that’s when we should trust God as Zechariah did. There’s not much, if anything, we can do about these on our own. They’re too big for us to move all by ourselves. We need someone bigger, someone stronger to come and pull them out of the way. Thank God that the mighty Sunrise from on high is breaking upon us; thank God that God’s Son is coming to visit us with peace, healing, freedom, justice, joy, and salvation.
The traditional theme of the second Sunday in Advent is peace. Seen from some angles, the end goal of salvation is peace: peace with God, peace in our personal relationships, peace in our hearts, peace between all the nations on earth.
Zechariah tells us that this peace is coming as sure as the sunrise. John tells us that we must prepare for its arrival. God’s salvation can do away with every war. It can put an end to every act of violence. But if our hearts continue to stoke the fires of anger, to fan into flame the embers of selfishness, to shelter the glowing coals of fear or bitterness, God’s peace cannot enter into them. We must prepare our hearts to accept God’s peace.
So what keeps you from God? I challenge you to prepare the way for Jesus’ arrival this Christmas. Join me in a quiet moment right now. Ask God to help you name those things which block the road between you and God. Confess the barriers that you’re still building. Ask God to show you how to clear others out of the way--to fill in the valleys, to smooth out the crooked and rough places of your life.
Now ask God to help you name those things that are beyond your control, those things you need God to save you from. Pray for God to come and bring peace, healing, deliverance. God promised to answer this kind of prayer. Jesus is God’s “Yes” and “Amen” to these kind of requests. Ask God to help you trust like Zechariah, to trust that salvation is coming for all of us.
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