PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD!

‘’PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD!”

            “You children of snakes!  Who told you to run from the fire that’s about to bust over your heads?”  These are the harsh comments that John the Baptizer has for the religious leaders when they come out to the Jordan to inspect him and to see what is so powerful and so scary about what he is doing in his ministry.  My quote is from the Cotton Patch Version of the Gospel of Luke by Clarence Jordan.   You can hear Nat Turner’s voice in these words.  You can hear the mommas who watch their sons and daughters sold off into slavery.  You can hear the voices of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina.

            John is a man on fire, cajoling and pleading for God to come and intervene in human history to provide justice and mercy.  He challenges the religious establishment by attacking Temple worship at Jerusalem, a worship that we are seeing revived by President Trump’s endorsement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.   John’s emphasis is that it is time to get right with God, and the way to do that is not to go to the Temple in Jerusalem but rather to come out to be baptized in the Jordan River. 

            Luke begins his gospel not with the birth of Jesus but with the conception of John the Baptizer.  Luke tells us that John’s parents have been unable to have children, and as usual, the wife named Elizabeth is blamed for it – Luke 1:7 tells us that she is barren. Since they have no children, however, how do we know that the husband Zechariah isn’t the barren one?  An angel appears to Zechariah the priest right before he goes out to lead worship – the appearance is an announcement that he will have a child.  Zechariah is stunned and not quite sure if it is true, but the angel brooks no dissent.  Zechariah loses his voice – a terrible thing for a preacher – until his son, who will be named John, is born.

            In the middle of this story the angel Gabriel goes to Mary to engage her, and we’ll look at that next week.  After the birth of John, we don’t hear anything else about him in Luke until he bursts on the scene in Luke 3.  John comes from the margins, from the wilderness, and he challenges those at the center of life to shift their social location, to come out to the Jordan and find a new life.  He also invites those at the margins to find a new definition of themselves, to hear that they belong to God, not to any of the powers who seek to claim their loyalty, even as they are told that they belong at the edges of life rather than at the center of life.

            Both Luke and Matthew’s gospels begin John’s adult story with quotes from Isaiah 40 about preparing the way of the Lord, in which every valley shall be lifted, and every mountain made low.   From the beginning there is a sense here of great reversal, and indeed the Christmas stories are full of such reversals:  Mary’s song praises God for lifting up the lowly and sending the rich away empty.  The baby is born not in a fine home or medical center but on the streets in a cowbox.

            As we jump into the Advent and Christmas season – maybe some of us are dragged into it – let us remember John’s fire, those pushed to the margins, and our own dreams about our lives.  This season is a time of memories, hopes, fears and longings.    As the preacher Phillips Brooks put it in his famous song that has become a favorite Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem:”  “the hopes and fears of all the years are born in thee tonight.”  May we know the birth of that baby in our own hearts and find the fire and vision that led John the Baptizer.