Prepare the Way

Scriptures:         Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72 ; Romans 15:4-13,   Matthew 3:1-12

 

 

Prepare The Way

We’re now in the second week of Advent, that season of waiting for the Christ child.   God won’t allow us to wait by ourselves, and so he’s sent someone to keep us company on our journey – John the Baptist.  John the Baptist, however, isn’t the most congenial company.  In fact, if you were in an elevator or a subway car with him, you’d likely be scrambling and climbing over people to get out.

 

Our reading tells us that John taught and baptized in the wilderness, near the River Jordan, where many centuries before, the Israelites had crossed the Jordan River and entered the promised land.  John dressed in clothing of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist.  This would have reminded the people of his day of the prophet Elijah from centuries before, perhaps the greatest of the prophets, who likewise dressed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist.  So by his appearance and his location, he is reminding his audience of times in which God had acted mightily in Israel’s history.  To translate this into our terms, we might think of somebody dressed in a colonial era costume and standing near Independence Mall, making statements about American society.  The choice of colonial-era clothing and the location near Independence Mall would remind people of our country’s Founding Fathers and would lend such a person more credibility in speaking about American society.  In the same way, John’s appearance and location, by reminding his listeners of Elijah, gave John credibility with the people.

 

And John the Baptist needed all the credibility he could muster, because his was not a warm and fuzzy message.    This was not Santa Claus coming with a stocking full of toys.  John the Baptist was more like an irate parent yelling “Clean up your room!  Comb your hair!  Pull up your socks! Company’s coming!”   He came as an instrument of God’s love, but for John, God’s love is tough love indeed.

 

And John didn’t have a lot of respect for the big shots of his day.   When John saw the Sadducees, who were leaders of the Temple at Jerusalem approaching side by side with their religious and political opponents, the Pharisees, who were more popular with and respected by the common people for their interpretations of the law, he called all of them, Sadducees and Pharisees alike, a brood of vipers, a snake pit.   John demands that they bear fruit worthy of repentance – that is to say, if you’re going to present yourself as men of God, the way you live your life had better reflect that.  Your actions have to match your words; you have to walk the way you talk.  John adds a sense of urgency by saying “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  That is to say, John is telling the religious leaders that if the way they treat other people doesn’t match the fine godly words they speak, God will reject them – so they’d best get their act together, and be quick about it.     

 

John goes on to speak of one coming who is more powerful than he, who will baptize not with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire.   In John’s time, in order to prepare wheat to be ground into flour, the wheat would be thrown up in the air so that the outer husk would be separated from the inner kernel.  And this is what John says will happen with people; that in our lives which God can use will be kept, and that which God cannot use will be tossed in the fire.

 

As I said, despite John’s repeated references to fire, there’s nothing warm about John’s message.  John is demanding, uncompromising.  And yet this is the one sent by God to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus.

 

What is God saying by sending such a harsh messenger to prepare the way for Jesus?  Our reading from Isaiah gives us a picture of the world as God would want it, the world God wants for us, a world where the wolf lives with the lamb, where a little child shall lead, where they will not hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain – a place where the knowledge of the Lord will be as deep and as plentiful as the waters of the sea.  That is the world God wants for us.  But that world will be messed up, polluted, if we try to come there bringing along all of our sins – our greed, our anger, our envy of others.  The very place where we want to be will be spoiled, for ourselves and everyone else, if we try to go there as we are – sort of like if we hiked far into an old growth forest to experience unspoiled nature at its best, only, once we got there, to start dumping out all our cigarette butts and empty soda bottles and such….we’d have spoiled the very place we had worked so hard to find, for ourselves, and for anyone who came after us.  And that how it is with Isaiah’s vision of God’s holy mountain – God wants us there, but as for all the sinful crud and baggage we all carry around…..not so much.  And so, John says, repent!  Turn around.  Change direction.  Live differently.  John’s baptism was a symbolic washing off of all the sin and crud of a lifetime, so that the people could begin again, fresh and new and clean. 

 

While our Isaiah passage gives us a beautiful vision of God’s holy mountain, it begins with words about a shoot coming out of a stump.  That stump represents the Jewish people under attack, a once-mighty tree cut down by God because of the corruption of their leaders.  Similar to John the Baptist’s warning about the ax laying at the root of the tree, in Isaiah, God had already used the ax and cut down a tree that was not bearing fruit.  Now all that’s left is a stump.  But the stump is not dead.  There’s life in that stump; the branch coming from the stump represents a coming leader who will lead the people with righteousness.  Early Christians looked back in this text and interpreted the branch from the stump to represent Jesus Christ, who came forth from the Jewish people to bring salvation to all.    

 

John’s harsh message is needed to break through our self-satisfied complacency, to shake us up and get our attention so that we can hear Jesus’ message of grace and forgiveness, and respond with changed lives.  After all, if we’re already healthy, why would we want to see a doctor?  If we already think we’re safe, why would we need someone to save us?  So we need John to remind us how far from being healthy and safe, so that we are open to receiving the healing and salvation that Jesus offers. 

 

I believe that God still sends us modern-day prophets, those like John the Baptist, to tell us things we really don’t want to hear but that God needs us to hear.  We could perhaps say that Nelson Mandela, who died late last week, was a messenger sent to proclaim a sometimes-unwelcome message of change to South Africa.  Imprisoned for 27 years because of his leadership of political opposition to South Africa’s policy of apartheid, or separation of races, he spent 18 of those years on Robben Island, where he lived in an 8 foot by 7 foot cell with just a small mat to sleep on and was allowed only two letters and two visits per year.  Today he is mourned as a father figure to the nation of South Africa and an international icon of racial reconciliation, but had been imprisoned for all those years because he was considered dangerous, a threat to South Africa’s government – and not only to South Africa’s government.   The US State Department carried him on their list of terrorists for some 20 years, from 1988 until his removal from the US State Department terrorist list in 2008.  Nelson Mandela was considered anything but a warm and fuzzy figure, as he spoke against South Africa’s policies of racial separation - he was considered a dangerous radical.  But the words he spoke were words his country’s leadership needed to hear, and he kept speaking those words through nearly 30 years of imprisonment until his country was willing to listen. 

 

It’s dangerous to be a prophet, dangerous to speak unwelcome truth to entrenched power.  For speaking truth to power, John the Baptist was imprisoned and later executed, his head presented on a platter as a gift to his political enemies.  For speaking truth to power, Jesus was crucified, though by God’s power he rose from the dead on the third day.  For speaking truth to power, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nearly 30 years.  And so I’d encourage us to consider who might be the prophetic witnesses in our midst, speaking truth that we are reluctant to hear, insisting on change when we stubbornly and foolishly insist on more of the same.  What husks of sin and complacency is God trying to remove from our lives, so that we can become fit to be nourishing kernels of wheat, fit to bring the good news of Jesus Christ, the living bread from heaven, to others.  When our lives are being shaken up, when we find ourselves going through changes, it may be that, like wheat in the granary, we are being tossed about and shaken up in order that the good kernels of wheat in our lives may be separated from the chaff of sin. 

 

From Psalm 95:  “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.”  May God grant us ears open to the messengers of truth God sends us, and may we have lips and hands eager to respond with kind words and caring deeds.  Amen.