The Star of Peace and John the Baptizer

The Star of Peace and John the Baptizer by Fred Kane
Luke 3:1-6 Are you getting ready for Christmas? There are only 14 more shopping days, you know. When we think of, "Getting ready for Christmas," we often have trees and cookies or gifts and lights in mind. Luke's Gospel asks us, "Are you getting ready for Christmas?" But then tells a story. It's the story of a man named John, called the Baptizer, who sits out there in the bleak and merciless Palestinian desert proclaiming the anticipated coming of the Messiah and calling men and women to prepare through a revolutionary change in behavior. When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem they took a portion of the population of Jerusalem back with them to Babylon as sort of an insurance against an uprising. It was cheaper to move potential trouble makers back to Babylon than to garrison an army in a far away hostile land. That's how the Jew got to Babylon. They were, "ransom captive Israel" in Babylon. The prophets saw the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon as the moral consequence of the choices that the nation had made. They made wrong choices, trusting in material things, in arms and in idols and in money, rather than trusting God. Then there comes news that the exile is ended and the captives are free. That means that they can turn away from that past. They can go home now. God is offering them a new future. They can live a new life now. So, "Comfort my people." Tell them that the war is over, they have paid for their sins, and they can go home now. The pathway to that future is painted in a beautiful image of a highway being constructed in the desert from Babylon to Jerusalem. On that highway God will come and take God's people home. So, in the wilderness "prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God." There are even engineering instructions included in the passage, "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill be made low; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed." So God comes to set people free, to redeem them from bondage, and to lead them to a new life. You can see why Christians said that Isaiah was talking about Christmas. We see that Christmas is the beginning of that freedom, that redemption, that new life. The first Christians said that the voice crying in the wilderness to, "Prepare the way of the Lord," is John the Baptizer. His voice cries in the wilderness to make ready for the coming of God into our life to give us a new future. John is the one asking, "Are you getting ready for Christmas?" Hallmark, Toys 'R' Us, Safeway and Sprint may be asking you if you are getting ready for Christmas, but the Christmas that they have in mind has no connection with the Christmas John the Baptizer points us toward. John is the voice crying in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord." John is the voice preparing us for the Messiah. Except John's message is not "comfort my people." John does not speak "tenderly" to Jerusalem. John is at the River Jordan, on the edge of the wilderness, shouting (hollering is probably the better word), "Repent; for the Kingdom of God is coming." His voice bounces off the desert walls: "Repent!" His voice is heard clear up in the Temple precincts in Jerusalem: "Repent!" His voice like a mighty wind sweeps up into Galilee, to Herod's palace and bounces off the walls there: "Repent!" His voice echoes in the consciences of all the people of the land: "Repent!" The crowds flock around John and hear him demand conduct unlike anything they have practiced before. They hear John's demand to repent, to reshape their lives, to turn around and march to a different drummer and they stand there shocked, stunned by what lies before them and ask, "In light of this new world crashing in upon us, in preparation for this Messianic age, for God's sake, what shall we do?" And John tells them and he tells us. He is tough. John does not tell them to go to church more often, to read the Bible, to tithe, to say their prayers. "You think you can claim to be children of Abraham, to lean on your religious credentials? Forget it. God can raise children right up out of these desert stones with no effort. All your church attendance, your vested choirs, your gilded sanctuaries, your tithes and offerings, your prayers, hymns and sermons mean nothing. Your ritual without repentance is a joke. If you want to prepare yourself for the new age become alert to the terrible gap between rich and poor, the disenfranchised, disinherited, the so-called boats left out of the rising tides now slowly sinking beneath the surface: shed your indifference to the ones suffering from injustice, discrimination and poverty. Whoever has two coats must share with him who has none, and whoever has food must do like wise." You see, there is no Christmas charity here! John isn't talking about alms for the poor, but about charting a recasting of the system where terrible disparities exist and opening channels of equity for everyone without regard to race or sex, national origin, social class or religion. Tax collectors meet John in the desert. He says to them, "Collect no more than is appointed you. No more business-as-usual." The Messianic age cuts the roots of graft, the game of cost overruns. It evaporates the payoff, the kickback, the torn up ticket. The rotten campaign contribution seeking influence, the soft money buying access, the deal made at the expense of another - gone! All of that behavior is dissolved by that Messianic world careening around the celestial bend. Soldiers who wander out to that desert outpost ask, "What shall we do?" John's radical answer is, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages." What is he saying? Sounds pretty tame, doesn't it? Tell the truth and keep your promises. But, John is tougher than that. He is telling us that in Christ's future, government does not cater to the interests of those with money; it is not a prop for the social or political elite; its forces of taxation, policing and military power are not there to defend unjust status quos, to feed fat cats at public troughs, to justify forces sustaining oppression, to hide those public servants who lie under oath. John condemns patriotic allegiance distorting, competing with or distracting our primary allegiance to Jesus Christ and the people of this world whom Christ represents. Do you see it now? Do you see getting ready for Christmas as Luke sees it? Getting ready for Christmas means getting ready for the new world John sees surrounding the Nazarene strolling toward him through the desert blaze and it pictures a revolutionary ethic as if we lived in a world turned upside down and backwards. So are you getting ready for that kind of Christmas? You see, John has only one message. He stands here, knee deep in the muddy water of this church sanctuary looking at you and me with these dark, deep-set, penetrating eyes, and he says to you and to me, "Repent. Turn your life around!" You probably won't see John the Baptizer on any Christmas cards this year or any other year. He's not the kind of guy we really want to have around at Christmas. But he is part of the story. He is the main figure, the dominant figure, in Advent as we prepare for Christmas. In the lectionary of the Church, the lessons we read to prepare for Christmas, every year John the Baptizer is here in the second week, and sometimes in the third, too. That means, if you plan your absences right you've got about a fifty-fifty chance of getting to Christmas without seeing John the Baptizer. Those of you here today didn't plan it quite right. Today, John the Baptizer points at you with this bony accusing finger, shaking it in your face, "Repent! Turn your life around!" The Church decided a long time ago that John the Baptizer was not only the one who prepared Israel for the coming of the Messiah. But, John the Baptizer should be the one who prepares you for the celebration of Christmas. I hear people say almost every year, "That's sure a strange way to prepare for Christmas, because Christmas is about peace and hope and joy and love." Everybody knows that, "Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love divine; Love was born at Christmas; Star and angels gave the sign." So why is John the Baptizer hollering repentance? There is a reason. The danger in preaching unconditional love at Christmas time is that we will think that nothing is required of us. But you still hear it. You hear it in the churches. You hear it on the radio. You hear it in the mall. Christmas is all about love. You will see sentimental TV specials that will always end with some word about this being what Christmas is all about. Christmas is about peace and hope and joy and above all, it's about love. You will send a Christmas card with just "Love" written on it. It's like that old 60's song, "Love is all you need." That's all you need. It says it all. Love is what Christmas is all about. I am sure that is why Christmas is so popular both inside and outside of the Church. Here's the stable, the manager, a baby in the manger, given to us unconditionally, because God loves us. It's irresistible. "God so loved the world that God gave an only Son." That's the heart of Christmas, love. This world is dying for the lack of love. It's why we sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know." But, we also need to sing, "Jesus asks something of me, this I forget." You see, that's our problem. Christianity is about unconditional love all right, which means I am accepted as I am. But that doesn't mean that I should stay the way I am. Christianity is about changes in your life and in my life. It's about a life of justice and mindful compassion. The baby who is born in a manger, grows up, and preaches the same message that John preached, "Repent!" Jesus comes into Galilee, preaching the gospel saying, "The time is fulfilled, the realm of God is at hand; repent, and believe this good news." Do you see the sequence? First comes the gift, and then comes the response. First there's a baby in a manger, then there is Jesus, the man, teaching in Galilee. First there is the gift of love, then there's the question, "What are you going to do now that you have received this love?" Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, who joined the resistance against Hitler, established an underground seminary during those days. Out of that experience he wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship. It's a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. In it he makes the distinction between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." Cheap grace is going to church to hear the comfortable words, the good news about God's unconditional love. Then snuggling in it doing your churchly good deeds as if it were a down comforter, leaving church with a warm, peaceful feeling, but not letting the one who brought that love into the world, who died for you because of that love, challenge the way you are now living. In the Bible repentance is not just remorse for the past, feeling sorry that you did something. In the Bible repentance is making a decision about the future, how you are going to live. It's the realization that God is giving you a new opportunity for life, and seizing that opportunity. The righteous were always telling Jesus to go tell the sinners to repent. Instead, he told the sinners, you are forgiven. He told the righteous to repent, especially those in power, the priests, scribes, Pharisees, and the Sadducees. They were good people, moral people by any standard. They kept waiting for Jesus to go tell other people to repent, to stop their sinning. Jesus kept telling the strong and the righteous in this world to start doing something good. He told them to repent of their pride, their smugness, their hypocrisy and self-righteousness, their narrow prejudice and enormous greed. Jesus did not tell the weak to repent. He healed them and forgave them. He told the strong to repent. I believe that God gives every generation and every person an opportunity to choose life, to choose a new future. That is what this gospel is telling us. "The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is at hand." The time comes to us fulfilled in every generation. The opportunity is here for us to do something individually with our lives, and corporately as a nation. God is offering us new life, offering us opportunity for greatness. Never has there been such an opportunity, because never has there been such power and wealth, and never have so many people possessed it. What are we going to do with it? I believe that is the moral question of our time. What are we going to do with all that we have? Are we going to use it to address the enormous needs of our communities or are we going to consume it on things that we probably don't need? What God gives every generation is the possibility to do something great with what God has given that people.
  • A reporter was covering the tragic conflict in the middle of Sarajevo and he saw a little girl shot by a sniper. The reporter threw down his pad and pencil and stopped being a reporter for a few minutes. He rushed to the man who was holding the child, and helped them both into his car. As the reporter stepped on the accelerator, racing to the hospital, the man holding the bleeding child said, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still alive." A moment or two later, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still breathing." A moment later, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still warm." Finally, "Hurry. Oh, my God, my child is getting cold." When they reached the hospital, the little girl had died. As the two men were in the lavatory, washing the blood off their hands and their clothes, the man turned to the reporter and said, "This is a terrible task for me. I must go and tell her father that his child is dead. . . He will be heartbroken." The reporter was amazed. He looked at the grieving man and said, "I thought she was your child." The man looked back and said, "No, but aren't they all our children?"
Aren't they, indeed? Aren't they all God's children, wherever they may be at this Christmastime in Sarajevo, Monrovia, Pyongyang, or Baghdad; Paducah, Kentucky; Mudende, Rwanda; Boston, Massachusetts; or Corvallis, Oregon? So, are you getting ready for Christmas? The star of peace is rising in the Christmas sky with the possibility of a new future coming to each one of us and to every nation. We must choose now, we must repent. It begins for any nation, in any community, with one person, then another, and then another, saying, "I'm going to accept the future that God is giving to us, rather than simply repeating the past." Every year in Advent, John and Jesus are here saying, "Repent; for the time is fulfilled, and the Realm of God is at hand." God is offering you a new future. Choose it. Turn away from the past. Accept what God is offering you. So, are you getting ready for Christmas? To be sure, order your poinsettias, string the lights on the tree, bake your cookies, send your cards - and yes, wait on tip-toe. But, better yet, throw your life - your whole being - into serving that new world hurtling toward us, changing everything, turning us around, bearing us into a radical future ruled finally, from a rude Bethlehem manger.