Advent

Christmas is coming. This is very obvious to all of us as we look around at all the decorations in the stores and on the streets and in people’s homes and the Christmas Carols that we have been listening to for the past several weeks on the Radio and on the T.V. selling everything from toys to perfume to computers. Then there is that load of catalogues that comes to all of us in our daily mail. Santa Claus is posing with children in almost every Department Store. Christmas is coming! That is very obvious, except in the Church. We in the Church are involved at the present time in the season of Advent. This season of Advent is one which tends to be a plain and penitential time. We use dark purple hangings on the Altar and on the vestments of the clergy. In our worship, in our hymns and in our prayers there is little or nothing about Christmas and Christmas joy. In fact, if you consider what the traditional themes of Advent are they say very little about Christmas or anything to do with it. There is a very old custom, fortunately not much followed any more, that the invariable sermon topics for the four Sundays in Advent were to be, in this order, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Interesting that Hell came right before the celebration of Christmas. This does say something of the tone of this season upon which we are embarked.

The word Advent means “toward the coming.” Advent is the season of preparation for the coming of Christ. But it is the season of preparation, not for the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, not to celebrate that but a preparation for Jesus’ second coming. It is the preparation for that which you and I invariably declare when we recite the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” This season of Advent, which you and I are now in, does not look back. It looks to the future. For that reason alone it is as Fleming Rutledge tells us , “Advent is out of phase with our times.” Because it goes against all the usual rounds which we know all about and are very much involved in, of pre-Christmas cheer. There is none of the warmth and excitement generated that is going on in the world around us at this time as our world looks back over the years to a long ago birth. But, Advent season provides a very necessary counterpoint for us. Without Advent and without what it is concerned with, Christmas would be little more than a lot of warm fuzziness with little or no substance and little or no significance to it. You and I need this sobriety of this season of Advent, because it gives us a firm anchor in reality, in God’s reality, for Christmas and all that follows. What you and I need in this Advent season is this reminder of what we might call God’s unfinished business with us. Certainly our redemption in Christ Jesus was finished once and for all on Calvary, but God is not through with us yet, and so He will come again. The Bible ends with the business of God in Christ unfinished. The last words in the Bible are; “Surely I am coming soon!“ To which the believer responds; “Amen! Come Lord Jesus.”(Revelation 22:20) The scriptures tell us that it is not over with; there is more to come.

Then there is in Advent this dominant Biblical personality, the personality of John the Baptist. John the Baptist was not a particularly pleasant or likable person. What we see of him in the Gospels is that he is a sort of throw-back to those fierce prophets of the Old Testament, men who had not been seen in Israel for some 200 to 300 years. John was a hermit, he was a recluse. He lived alone in the wilderness, as many so called solitary religious people did at that time, it wasn’t a particularly unusual thing. Many men would abandon worldly life in order to get closer to God, to live a life of prayer and contemplation and conversation with God. They would communicate with God frequently, but seldom would they communicate with people. Actually, today there are still many of this same kind of religious hermits. In fact many of them living in that same forbidding wilderness that John the Baptist lived in, the caves in the lower part of the Jordan River valley. But for the most part, they lived, then and now, quiet out of the way lives; they lived and died without anybody paying much attention to them. But, John was different. John came suddenly out of the wilderness and he came with a dynamic message. He came preaching reform and preparation. John, we are told in an early part of Saint Luke’s Gospel, (St. Luke 1:5-25) was born for one purpose. He was born to announce the coming of God’s chosen Messiah. John in his preaching found, at least at first, a very receptive audience. Because John suddenly appeared on the scene at a time when, as Saint Luke tells us, the people were “on the (I love this phrase) the tiptoe of expectation” ( St. Luke 3:15). Can you see what that kind of expectation is? Sort of like the expectation among both Democrats and Republicans that somebody is going to get elected. The people were on the tiptoe of expectation. They were expecting and they were hoping desperately hoping for God’s deliverer. Particularly, they were hoping for deliverance from the heel of the Roman conquerors. So John came and John was a dynamic preacher who quickly got people’s attention. He attracted to himself a great many disciples; but he also attracted a great deal of disapproval. The religious authorities were very concerned about John, the minute he appeared because they were afraid he might stir up some kind of a rebellion and this would bring quick retribution from the Roman authorities, something which had happened fairly frequently in their recent past. John quickly gained the animosity of the local rulers, particularly Herod, the Tetrarch. Herod jailed John because John had insulted him. Told him he had no business marrying his brother’s wife. Eventually, Herod had John beheaded as a reward for a dancing girl. (St. Matthew 14:3-12)

On the Second Sunday of Advent we are introduced to John. “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.” (St. Luke 3:2-3) If you look at this whole Gospel passage, the beginning of the third chapter of Saint Luke’s Gospel, it really is a kind of curious second introduction to the Gospel. If you go back and look at the first two chapters, they recount for us essentially the Christmas story and all the wonder and all the loveliness around it. Also the birth of John the Baptist. Those first two chapters end with the story of the child, Jesus, at the age of 12 in the Temple. Then Luke sort of starts all over again. He jumps ahead thirty years or so with no explanation, no transition, no discussion of anything that might have intervened, And then he gives us essentially a political introduction. He lists all the political leaders of the time when John appeared, beginning with the worldwide and down to the local. The Emperor, Tiberius, the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, those local puppet rulers under the Emperor, then those two Jewish High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas, who ostensibly were religious but actually they were mostly political. Notice there is nothing particularly holy or religious about the setting into which Luke places John the Baptist. It contrasts greatly with the strongly religious and holy overtones that we see in those wonderful stories in the first two chapters. The leaders who he lists were generally opposed to Jesus; Pilate and Caiaphas together were responsible for his crucifixion some three years later and by in large the political leaders opposed Jesus and they opposed the early Christian Church. You see Luke puts John the Baptist and thus the beginning of our Lord’s public ministry, not in some great religious, nor in some great spiritual setting; but he puts it right down in the real world. He starts right out saying, this is going on in the secular world, it is going on down where there are rulers and politicians. It is in that setting that the Revelation of the Love of God in Christ comes. It is in that setting that our Redemption is played out.

Luke connects John back into the heart of the Old Testament; back to the words of that unknown prophet in the second part of the Book of the prophet Isaiah where he speaks of “the voice of one crying in the wilderness; prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Isaiah 40:3). Luke finds in John’s message of repentance and preparation some of that same hope and expectation that was expressed by the prophet, in the imminent approach of God’s caring Love for His people. The writer of Second Isaiah, whom he quotes, was writing at the end of the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people. They had been carried away by the Babylonian conquerors from Jerusalem to Babylon in the year 586 BC. Then, some 75 to 80 years later, with the rise of King Darias of Persia and the fall of the Babylonian empire: (all in politics, you see), the possible return of God and God’s people to God’s Temple in Jerusalem. The prophet issues a call for preparation and a call for a Highway; for a route for God and God’s people to return to God’s promised land. What he is really calling for is not a physical highway but for an opening; an opening in the heart for God to act.

We see this same thing, in the writer of the Apocryphal book of Baruch . Some 100 to 150 years before the Birth of Jesus was when he was writing. He was writing in another time of great turmoil and great trouble and distress for Israel. They were under the heel , at that time, of a different conqueror, the Syrians. Yet here, this writer comes up with this same wonderful assurance of God’s love and care for Israel. He uses that same wonderful illustration of that highway in the wilderness. God has ordered that every mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. A highway to God. A highway for God. This, a continuing theme . A highway built for God to enter into the heart and the soul of his people. (Baruch 5:5-9)

And so it was that John the Baptist was preaching his repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and baptism to those accepting his message, this symbol of death to sin and rebirth to new life. Luke saw in John and his message, this preparation of the people for the coming of the Lord through repentance and baptism. It would be a preparation of a highway to the heart. A filling of the valleys of despair; a bringing down of mountains of pride; a straightening of crooked paths of evil desires; and a smoothing of rough places of wrath. The preparation for the coming of God’s Messiah. For Luke this was, of course, the coming of Jesus. Luke was looking back to all of this through the perspective of Jesus’ resurrection. Luke was certain that Jesus was God Incarnate; that he was the Christ, the Messiah of God.

So you and I, as Christians, observe this season of Advent with all of its looking forward. We are observing the season of Advent as the world around us is frantically preparing for Christmas. Actually, outside, where we live most of the time, you and I are involved in that same frantic preparation. It is a preparation that is focused on the past. It is a preparation that is looking back; looking back to a wonderful event in the past. But the problem is, if we only focus on the past, however lovely that is, it has little staying power. If we only focus on the past, without recognizing God’s continuing involvement and his ultimate involvement in the history of mankind, then this is something we do for a short while and then pack it away in the attic for another year. So, you and I come to Christmas, but we come to Christmas through Advent. We come to Christmas, that wonderful action of God in Christ in that birth in Bethlehem, through the perspective of the future, knowing that that future, our future, is in God’s hands. That enables us to celebrate, with unrestrained joy the beauty and the wonder of that long ago birth, not just as nostalgia for the past but as hope for the future and promise for the future. The promise that God is not finished with this world, that God is not finished with us. That there is more to come. So, as we celebrate with joy the birth of Jesus some 2,000 years ago, we also look forward with expectant joy to the future sure of God’s loving care in the coming of that same Jesus. With the writer of the book of Baruch, we can speak, as he did with wonderful confidence in the future. “God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.” (Baruch 5:9)