Luke 1:68-79
Luke 3:1-6
These are weird times. At least, they feel that way to me. Maybe weird only somewhat captures it. When we are talking about the weather I suppose it may. Just as we recorded the warmest Connecticut November in history, the northern plains get snow dumped on them and Oklahoma and Texas get ice storms. Extreme weather patterns are on the rise, and whether or not it is too late to do anything about it hasn’t been so clearly determined. You wonder, could it really be that our port cities will find themselves under water in the near future?
That’s where “weird” turns into scary and unsettling. Never in any of our lifetimes has there been a migration the size of which the world is seeing now. These are real people, fleeing for their lives by the millions. Where can they go, and when they get there what happens to them? What happens to the people who are already there?
I was thinking about these things on Wednesday morning only to see a few hours later that gunmen killed 14 and injured many more in an inexplicable attack at a service facility for persons with disabilities.
San Bernadino, of course, was on the tail end of the mass murders in Paris, which so powerfully reminded us all of the horrors of 911 and the reality of terror in this world, apparently anywhere and anytime.
There are wars, of course, and there are rumors of wars. There’s the US and Russia at odds over Syria, and serious questions about who is shooting whose plains down.
A good friend of mine is very concerned about systemic collapse and catastrophic breakdowns that would radically alter life as we know it. Whenever I talk to him about the subject the dire possibilities feel frighteningly plausible. What would we do? What should we do in a world that feels far more fragile and vulnerable now than it ever has before, at least to me its been feeling that way?
Well, just in the nick of time comes John the Baptist. John is our theme for the middle two Sundays of Advent. “Prepare the way of the Lord!” says John. “Make straight a highway for our God.”
Part of me says, You know, we’ve been here before. We’ve prepared the way before. We’ve heard that the kingdom has come near. We’ve heard that the savior is born. We’ve heard that the messiah has come. But, here we are, and preparing for what exactly? What exactly is it that is getting better from all this preparing and proclaiming?
When I mentioned my concerns at lectionary group another pastor replied, “But, you know, the world is safer now than it has ever been. Think just about biblical times. Genocide was a common pattern. Tribes wiped out tribes. The victors completely and literally annihilated the losers. In Jesus’ time the Romans oppressed everyone. They occupied the known world and no one lived in what we would call freedom.” The world may seem scary now, but for these people it was always a mess. And, this, we should remember, is what Jesus was born into, a mess.
Honestly, there are plenty of times when I wish he would have fixed it. I wish he would fix it now. But, he didn’t and he doesn’t seem to be doing it. Instead, he is born into it and he lives in it with us. He lives through it with us and he invites us to receive that birth, to receive that life, and to let it work its love in us, through us, and around us, and to thereby also experience power, and redemption, and resurrection even now as we make our ways through a confusing world.
I don’t know if we are safer now or not. But, I know that we prepare the way from God to our hearts and lives year after year because whenever we stop preparing, whenever we think the paths between us are smooth, we get lost and sleepy. We get lulled into our routines and into patterns of thought and action that blind us to God’s thought and action.
“Prepare the way of the Lord,” says John. “Make God’s paths straight.” Zecharia says something similar in his famous song. “God has granted that we would be rescued from the power of our enemies so that we could serve God without fear.” For both men the point here is action; the point is service. “Prepare!” meaning, “You do it!” “Act!” Yes, God is on the move. God is alive and at work, but in order to get it and see it you must be a part of it. You must act too!
I had a mentor when I was starting out in ministry who once said, “When life is stressful, when things at church are hard, when God isn’t easily found, stop what you are doing and go out and visit someone.” Of course, that’s exactly when you don’t feel like visiting someone. But, I’ve found his advice to be pretty spot on. Connect with another person, another person who for whatever reason could use your love and attention. It gets you out of yourself and it gets you into what God is doing.
A woman named Kay is always the shining example of this for me. Kay lived in New Canaan in one of the last remaining little homes in town. Her property bordered an elementary school, so a couple days a week Kay would make her way across the playing fields to read to the children. She volunteered for over 40 years doing this. She helped teach hundreds of children how to read and then she taught their children too. Every day wherever she went someone recognized her, someone remembered the little lady who gave them her time and her love, and someone said hello, or gave her a hug, or came up to offer a word of thanks.
When my paths to the Lord didn’t feel all that smooth or straight, visiting with Kay always made a difference. Of course, I didn’t get her whole story in one visit. But, over time I did, and with each visit I felt a sense of power coming from that little old lady in her little old house. Obviously, it wasn’t power like we’re prone to thinking of power; rather, it was the gentle kind of power that comes through love and works both softly and profoundly.
It is also a power I wouldn’t have seen or felt if I hadn’t been encouraged to go out and visit, to go out and act.
Kay is just one example, but lots of other examples come to mind. There was the most beautiful Thanksgiving I ever celebrated when my sister who was hosting announced that, despite my preference to watch football, we would be serving Turkey dinner at the food pantry.
There was that ASP trip where the adult chaperones fought the whole way down to Kentucky, making life miserable for the whole group. What healed us was the woman whose home we were fixing. She was so thankful we were there, and she saw in our presence the generous grace of God. She gathered us on her porch and held our hands and praised God for each one of us who had been guided there to help her. It was just what we needed to get us back on track.
I have more examples, and I think that you probably do as well. …What I’m hearing in Advent’s call for preparation even in the midst of all that is chaotic and messy is also a call to act, to do something, to do what you can, to offer love and care and help however you might. In so doing, we’ll be joining God, and therefore also readying ourselves to receive God.