Luke 3:1-6
December 9, 2018
I.
The Lord’s coming is the ultimate revelation of the truth: the truth of God, the truth of creation and history, and the truth about our own nature as humans made in the image of God. What happens in Bethlehem informs us about and reveals to us what is real. It tells us how to get real ourselves.
The early church confesses that God becomes human so that humans may realize our own true nature in God. The Nativity shows us who we are and our destiny. It is about what kind of a world we are going to live in both now and in the age to come. It is a story that is of existential importance to every human being.
Last week we noticed that there is a sense in which the Lord’s coming is happening all the time if we have the eyes to see it. If we know how to read the signs of the times we may perceive how God is always breaking into creation and human life. The one whose function in the story is to open people’s eyes and prepare them for the coming of the Lord is John the Baptizer. If no one comes to the Father except by Jesus Christ; in this season we recognize that no one comes to Jesus Christ without first passing through John and what he represents.
John’s ministry is “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” That is, he ritually immerses people in the Jordan River, a ceremony that symbolizes their letting go of whatever separates them from God, creation, others, and from their own true nature. Then, seeing themselves now as changed people, they live lives of repentance by thinking and acting differently. Because they have thus let go of their old ignorant, fearful, violent selves, they may now embrace new lives that are open and receptive to the coming of the One who is the true life of all.
Mired and bound by ego-centricity, people are not immediately able to see, receive, and welcome the Messiah, that is to say, our true nature, when he comes. We need to pass through some kind of mediating, preparatory experience before we can perceive who Jesus Christ really is. This is part of what the season of Advent is about.
If we skip this preparatory step of repentance and forgiveness of sins… that is, if we attempt to jump right to the Nativity, we don’t actually get to the real Nativity at all. We instead get diverted to a shallow, counterfeit holiday that merely indulges in greed, materialism, and sentimentality. We binge, we crash, we wake up hung-over, we clean up the mess, and we wait for the consumer spending report to determine if the season was successful or not.
There is no Advent at the mall. They’ve been playing Christmas music since October.
II.
This preparatory step we have in the season of Advent is not immediately about comfort and joy. The stories we read in Advent are difficult. John the Baptizer is not a holly-jolly guy. He runs a kind of spiritual boot-camp in the desert where he tries to shock people out of their resignation and depression, and awaken them to the truth by dunking them in the river. And his message is about repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
No doubt you have noticed that in our worship service we have a “Prayer for Wholeness” in the place where traditionally there is a “Prayer of Confession.” I became somewhat frustrated with the usual Prayers of Confession. Either they were so general as to be meaningless, or they were so specific that they didn’t relate to everyone. People would dutifully mouth them and then I would pronounce them all forgiven and it just seemed so disingenuous sometimes.
I’ve been in churches where there were folks who wanted to ditch the confession altogether because it was such a downer. It focused too much on the negative, I was told. It’s a guilt-trip. It reminded them of the oppressive churches they were sent to as children.
A Prayer for Wholeness attempts to reframe all this in terms of a brokenness in which we all share. It is not about guilt so much as sorrow and frustration. It’s not about getting people to artificially feel bad about themselves; it is to give us space to accept that we do already feel bad about a lot of things that we seem to have no control over. Sin is a pervasive condition which hurts everyone and in which everyone participates.
A Prayer for Wholeness is more in the spirit of the first of the 12-steps of recovery in which we admit that we are powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable. We have messed up ourselves and our world. That’s not a guilt-trip, that’s just a fact.
The season of Advent is like a Prayer for Wholeness with which we begin the whole Christian year. It is a time to clear away the self-serving, self-righteous stories that shape our normal ego-centric existence, and to realize that that’s not working very well for us, really. Fear and anger, greed, gluttony, lust, and envy… these approaches are not helping us. They are actually hurting us, everyone around us, and even the whole planet.
The second of the 12-steps is that we come “to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us.” And in Advent we turn our consciousness to that Power coming into the world. We, who are on the Jesus-path, know and believe in this Power, which is God; and we know the benefit to be gained from a reminder of this important spiritual step of preparation.
It’s not about guilt; it is about hope in what we know is true. And a realization that we too often and too easily lose sight of that.
III.
John the Baptizer comes to fulfill the words from Isaiah 40 about preparing the way of the Lord by straightening out our lives, filling the valleys, flattening the mountains, and leveling the uneven places so that everyone will see and know God’s saving love. Advent means creating a space open and ready for God’s arrival. It means getting rid of inequalities and injustices. It means bringing down the guard-towers and filling in the dungeons of the prison we have made of the world.
Back in chapter 1, Mary echoes Isaiah when she sings about scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away empty. There is this sense of bringing up what is low and bringing down what is high and creating an evenness and equality, removing obstructions and divisions, and realizing a common unity of focus.
It’s kind of like cleaning a filthy, grimy window so light can shine through it again. The light is always there. We just don’t see it as long as we have obstructed it with our selfish corruption.
The waiting of Advent is not passive and inert; it is quite active because the Lord comes immediately into the spaces we open up; his coming is realized in our acts of justice, love, compassion, and welcome as we are doing them. The light is always there. It’s not like we prepare a space and then stand around waiting; no, he comes to us in our act of creating the opening itself.
We are not “building the Kingdom of God;” rather we deconstruct and dismantle the earthly empires of inequality, oppression, and exploitation — and as we do that the Kingdom of God is what emerges.
This work has to begin within us. It has to begin in the soul and the heart. That’s why John the Baptizer is not running for political office in Jerusalem; he is not working “within the system.” Rather, he ministers to individuals and brings them to the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He brings people to wholeness, one at a time. Because only changed people change the world.
History is littered with well-meaning movements to change the world which eventually collapsed into oppression and corruption because they did not start with changing the souls of people, especially themselves. De-cluttering our houses, highways, and even bodies will be pointless if we do not first de-clutter and re-focus our interior life. All the stories and laws of Scripture are metaphors for inner process. They’re all about our need to transform our thoughts, feelings, and desires. Somehow we have to change what we want, reinterpret how we feel, and reassess what we really need.
IV.
This happens only when what gets transformed is our awareness of who we really are. Only when I realize that I am not the ego-centric, personality-driven, mortal, temporal human I think I am. I am not the collection of self-serving stories I tell about myself.
Paul says we need to cultivate the mind of Christ, that Christ is in us and we are in him. Peter says we participate in the divine nature. We regularly feed on Christ’s body which becomes our body. In the church we are together his body and individually members of him. The word “Christian,” when it was applied to the followers of the Way in the city of Ephesus, originally meant “little Christs.”
The baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins really means letting go of who we think we are and emerging into the light of who we really are. We are Christ in the world. With him we share in true humanity, and through him we share in the very life of God.
Our perspective is that of Jesus Christ, God-with-us. We now see that we are one with all people and all creation. Through him we identify with everyone, especially the needy, the suffering, the hungry, and the lost. Through him we serve all people.
For it is in those acts of service, expressing our oneness with God in Christ, that all flesh, everyone, does come to see God’s salvation.
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