Year C

Luke 3:1-6

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Most Urgent Task of Advent

Father Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest was condemned and hanged as a traitor in 1945 for his opposition to Hitler and while in a Nazi prison he wrote a piece titled “The Shaking Reality of Advent.”  In it he writes, “Woe to an age when the voices of those who cry in the wilderness have fallen silent, outshouted by the noise of the day or outlawed or swallowed up in the intoxication of progress or growing smothered and fainter for fear or cowardice.  Their heart goes before them, and that is why their eye is so clear-sighted, their judgement so incorruptible. They do not cry for the sake of crying or for the sake of the voice. They cry for blessing and salvation. Delp writes, O Lord, let the crying voices ring out, pointing out the wilderness and overcoming the devastation from within. May the Advent figure of John, the relentless envoy and prophet in God’s name, be no stranger in our wilderness of ruins. For how shall we hear unless someone cries out above the tumult and destruction and delusion?”

Father Delp wrote with a sense of urgency in his day, and with the same sense of urgency, John the Baptist cries out then and today.  As a prophet of God, he announced the beginning of Jesus’ ministry on earth. Luke states, that John the Baptist was sent from God with a mission to “testify concerning the light.” He was not the Messiah, but he came to announce his arrival, calling all who would listen into a state of readiness. People believed John, and by the hundreds came to him to be plunged into the river Jordan to receive a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. John was doing what the prophet Isaiah had said: preparing a pathway for the Lord himself to return to his people. He was the voice in the wilderness crying out for the way of God to be prepared with relentless urgency. This was the time. The old prophets like Malachi, had spoken of a time of renewal, through which God would come back to them. So when a fiery new young prophet appeared in the Judean wilderness going around the towns and villages telling people that the time had come, they were ready to listen.

John the Baptist is a verified historical figure. The Gospel of Luke sets John, the last of the Old Testament prophets, into the social and political history of ancient Israel. Although it is not possible to pinpoint an exact date even with Luke’s careful records, historians place the beginning of John’s ministry somewhere around A.D. 28. He is mentioned in all four gospels and in numerous other non-biblical sources, including the writings of the historian Josephus. John was the son of Zechariah. We read Zechariah’s prophetic song this morning. Zechariah was a priest who served in the temple. His mother, Elizabeth, a descendent of Aaron, was also from a priestly family and Luke tells us that Jesus and John were cousins through their mothers. Quite a colorful character he was. He wore a coat made of camel hair with a leather belt. He ate locusts and honey and although he was from the line of temple priests, his ministry was in the desert, a ministry that was a signal that upheaval was just around the corner.

People came to him to hear the word of the Lord and he remains for people of all ages a model of trust and confidence. He proclaimed the words of Isaiah that God is about to shake up the current arrangements-mountains and hills made flat, crooked places made straight, rough ways smoothed out. The salvation of God announced by John is leveling, upsetting, and overturning, calling for a new understanding of the way of God. And down through the ages, the message proclaimed by John and this season of Advent is unchanged: repent, change your ways, make straight your paths, for the Righteous One is coming. The message urges us to be enthusiastic even joyful in preparing for his coming. Advent is about preparation and John demands we get ready for Jesus.

His mission was to ask people to change their way of thinking by examining their lives, their values and their priorities. Asking all people to turn to God and from sin, to seek God’s forgiveness and to prepare the way of the Lord by joining in the vision God has of a redeemed world where peace and justice reigns. Today we lit the candle of peace. But peace remains elusive. We long for peace as “wars and rumors of wars” are all around. We think peace is something we can achieve through negotiations with our enemies. But peace cannot be gained apart from God and apart from that uncomfortable theological word, forgiveness that John proclaims in his baptism, along with lives that live with justice and mercy.

Max Lucado told this story in the Advent study “Because of Bethlehem.” You may have heard it before. On a crisp, clear morning in 1914, thousands of British, Belgian, and French soldiers put down their rifles, stepped out of their trenches and spent Christmas mingling with their German enemies along the Western front. In the years since, the event has been seen as a kind of miracle, a rare moment of peace just a few months into a war that would eventually claim over 15 million lives. The truce began with carol singing from the trenches on Christmas Eve, a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere. First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles, a most extraordinary thing ­– two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.

The next morning, in some places, German soldiers emerged from their trenches, calling out “Merry Christmas” in English. Allied soldiers came out warily to greet them. In others, Germans held up signs reading “You no shoot, we no shoot.” Over the course of the day, troops exchanged gifts of cigarettes, food, buttons and hats along with a game of soccer. The Christmas truce also allowed both sides to finally bury their dead comrades, whose bodies had lain for weeks on “no man’s land,” the ground between opposing trenches. The truce was widespread but not universal. And of course, it was only ever a truce, not peace. Hostilities returned, in some places later that day and in others not until after New Year’s Day. And though the Christmas Truce may have been a miracle in the conflict, the fact that it remains so widely commemorated speaks to the fact that at its heart it symbolizes a very human desire for peace, no matter how fleeting.

Hearing this story brought tears to my eyes because for a short moment in time God’s vision of a redeemed world was realized. And because of Bethlehem this vision will one day be realized when Christ returns but in the mean-time, we have the hard work that the prophets John the Baptist, Malachi, and Paul call us to today. May we listen to those who are crying out in the wilderness. For how shall we hear unless someone cries out above the tumult and destruction and delusion?” The liberating word of God might be the most urgent task we have. Prepare the way, make his paths straight.