Prepare The Way (2nd Sunday in Advent)

Scriptures:     Malachi 3:1-4,  Luke 1:68-79,   Philippians 1:3-11,  Luke 3:1-6

Today, on this second Sunday in Advent, we meet John the Baptist, the wild man in the wilderness who was to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus.  John reminds absolutely nobody of Santa Claus – while we don’t actually hear from him today, he’s loud, demanding, uncompromising.  We hear from John’s father, Zechariah – that was the first of the two readings from Luke, a paraphrase of which we also sung today as our 2^nd hymn. Zechariah, addressing his newborn son John, says, “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.”  Similarly, the second reading from Luke quotes from Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”  It sounds like a project for PennDOT, and a large one at that, but here we’re talking about preparing pathways to human hearts.

God did not just send Jesus out of the blue; the way for Jesus had to be prepared, and that preparation was done by John.   Our reading from Malachi warns that this preparation would not be easy or painless:  “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap.”  Of course, the way to remove impurities from metal is to heat the metal to very high temperatures so that the impurities burn off.  And fuller’s soap was the laundry detergent of its day.  So indeed, who can endure the day of the coming of God’s messenger?  It’s like being baked in an oven and having your mouth washed out with soap, all at the same time.  Not exactly a day at the beach.

But it’s necessary – in order for us to receive Jesus, our hearts must be prepared.  Until we realize we are ill, or someone points it out to us, we will not seek a physician.  Unless we realize how broken and twisted and sinful our lives are – or someone points it out to us, we will not seek forgiveness and restoration.  And that’s what John did – pointed out to anyone willing to listen that their society, and they themselves as individuals, were sick and toxic and needed to change.  John’s baptism of repentance was not just the formality it often is in our churches, but a symbolic act of turning away from society, polluted as it was by toxic Roman values as well as toxic interpretations of Jewish values, turning away from all of that, washing off all the spiritual slime that had collected in peoples’ lives, and starting over fresh and clean. 

Unfortunately, and tragically, I think we can see this need for prepared hearts, our need to repent, our nation’s need to repent, in our nation’s response to this year’s wave of mass shootings.  This week, a mass shooting by radicalized Muslims, a husband and wife, at an agency in San Bernardino, California, that worked with developmentally disabled persons.  Earlier that same day, in fact, there was a less publicized shooting in Savannah, Georgia.  Before that, the killing at the Planned Parenthood clinic by a white conservative Christian extremist.  Shootings at schools, shootings at churches, shootings at job sites, on and on.  According to the website Mass Shooting Tracker – which tracks shootings in which four or more persons, including the shooter, are killed or injured by gunfire – as of December 2 across the country there were 355 mass shootings this year – at that point an average of more than one a day.  Now granted, there’s a lots of room to quibble about their definition of mass shooting, which was a former but not the current FBI definition – it would include terrorist attacks, but also robberies.  Even so, that’s an awful lot of shootings.  It’s telling that former Australian Prime Minister Tim Fischer advocates warning Australians about the dangers of travel to the United States – he was making a political point, but still.  Perhaps even more dismaying is that, in our capitalist society, someone has found a novel way to make money off the threat of mass shootings – a company called ProTecht offers what it calls the Bodyguard Blanket, a bulletproof 5/16” thick pad, of the same material used by our military – but in sizes for kids to strap over themselves for protection against those annoying school shooting incidents.  They’re red, and when the kids wear them, they look like little red box turtles.  Perhaps if you buy two, they’ll throw in a Ginsu knife.  And no, except for the part about the Ginsu knife, I’m so not kidding.  It’s come to this – parents being offered for sale little mini Kevlar bulletproof blankets for their kids to take to school so they can maybe come home alive at the end of the day.  We’d rather do that than try to get at the root of the problem.

And what do we do?  Our politicians solemnly trot out each time and offer thoughts and prayers for the families.  Pastors do the same.  We post memes on Facebook.  And life goes on.  And nothing changes. More to the point, our behavior doesn’t change.  Our society’s behavior doesn’t change.  And, it’s been said, a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  A New York Daily News cover from a few days ago read, “God Isn’t Fixing This.”  Shocking as it sounds, I partly agree with the New York Daily News – God isn’t fixing this, because we won’t let God fix this, because to let God fix this would mean, not just prayers, but change, drastic change, at a societal level – and we’re not willing to change.  We’re only willing to mouth prayers.

Other countries don’t have incidents like this on a regular basis.  Other countries also don’t have anything like the number of guns floating around among their citizenry.  Other countries don’t have their politicians bought and paid for by the gun lobby and the military lobby.  But we do.  It’s part of our American exceptionalism…..a chicken in every pot, a gun alongside every pillow.

But we pray for peace, and for an end to the shootings.  Oh, do we pray.  We’re so good at praying.  But nothing happens.  Why, we ask?  Why doesn’t God answer our prayers? 

There are a number of places in Scripture where it’s clear that God makes no promises whatsoever that our prayers will always be heard, unconditionally.  I know that this sound shocking in light of our society’s popular notions of an all-loving, all-accepting God, just sitting around waiting for our prayers – but shocking though it may be, true it is.  And here are some citations, chapter and verse.  From Isaiah 58, referring to the people of Judah: “Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments; they delight to draw near to God. Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”  The people are praying and even fasting – wow, that’s some dedication, huh, surely God’s gotta pay attention to that, praying and fasting - but God ignores them, and the people ask why.  And God replies: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”  So God rejects prayers that come from a place of hypocrisy, especially when our behavior contradicts our prayers.    And we remember Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple – Luke 18, beginning with verse 9 - and the prayer of the self-righteous Pharisee – “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men” - was rejected while the prayer of the penitent tax collector  - Lord have mercy on me, a sinner” - was heard.  And James 4:3 reads, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend what you get on your pleasures.”  So prayers that come from a place of hypocrisy and greed – such as those of political leaders who solemnly mourn gun deaths in public while cashing in on gun lobby donations in private – will not be heard by God.  They just won’t.  Every time our national leaders pray for peace while cashing in on violence, God says to them, “Talk to the hand.”

How about our prayers?  It’s easy to mock political hypocrisy, sometimes harder to look at our own lives.  And yet, a big part of the mission of John the Baptist was to hold up a mirror to his listeners and let them see the ugliness in their own lives.

We pray for peace, and we should pray for peace.  But God will be more apt to hear our prayers for peace if we cry for peace, not only with our lips, but with our lives.  Ultimately, change begins with each of us. Our lives, and not only our words, need to be a prayer for peace.  And although we fool ourselves otherwise, ours is an incredibly violent culture…and the politics will never change if the culture doesn’t change, and the culture won’t change if we as individuals don’t change.  Change begins with us.  Most of our entertainment – TV, movies, computer games – is about bullets and bombs.  Can you imagine how quickly a proposed TV series about a specialist in mediation and non-violent conflict resolution would be rejected?  The series would never make it past the pilot, if it even got that far.  So instead we get shows about Jack Bauer.  Our entertainment tells us that the way to resolve problems is to kill the bad guy, and preferably torture him a little along the way.  We think this way on an individual level – see a robbery, shoot the bad guy – and we think this way on a global level – some country behaves in a way we don’t approve, we bomb them back to the stone age.  Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King said that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own government – our own government – that was during the Vietnam War – and fifty years and multiple wars in the Middle East later, it’s still true. While we have to look really hard to find clothing made in the USA or household products made in the USA or furniture made in the USA, it’s easy to find or to name guns and weapons made in the USA.   Here in the USA, we’re good at killing people, and we’re good at making stuff that kills people.  Indeed, much of our country’s gross national product is linked to killing people, linked to death…a national product that’s indeed “gross” in any number of ways….and I would say that’s a sign of a sick culture….cultures are supposed to promote life, not death.   Indeed, Martin Luther King said that “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Since then, our military budget has only grown while our programs of social uplift have been gutted or eliminated.   The shootings and terror attacks, then – and our unwillingness to change our ways – are perhaps signs that spiritual rigor mortis has set in on a national level.

There’s the saying that, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  In our culture, when the only tool to resolve conflicts that we’re willing to use is a gun, everything looks like a capital offense – and so, if somebody looks at somebody else wrong on the street, they waste ‘em, if someone has a grievance at work, they go postal.  If someone is cut off in traffic, road rage takes over.  Christian theologian Walter Wink says that America’s true national religion – the national religion we really believe in, the national religion we really trust, the national religion we really practice and live by – is not Christianity or Judaism, but rather what Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence” – basically violence as a sacred act, the myth that lasting good is brought about only through acts of sacred violence…the American version is the cowboy myth that salvation comes when the good guy kills the bad guy, saves the town, gets the girl, and rides off into the sunset.  Walter Wink says that in America, that’s our true national religion.  Redemptive violence was also the true religion of Jesus’ day – which is why Jesus made such extreme statements against violence of any kind, telling his followers to turn the other cheek and go the second mile and give one’s shirt if someone took your coat…why the earliest Christians outright refused military service, and were martyred for it…..so much of Jesus’ ministry and that of the early church was about challenging the extreme violence of his day, and the extreme violence of ours.   In the circle of violence that consumes our world, Jesus wants his followers to be circuit-breakers, to absorb the pain without passing it on.  A difficult place to stand, but without circuit breakers, circuits overload, buildings burn, people die.  Similarly, our call to serve as spiritual circuit-breakers to end the cycle of violence is a call to preserve life, not end it.  And Jesus showed us the way, absorbing the worst violence the Roman Empire could dish out, without passing it on to others.

In order for Jesus to come, John had to prepare the way by bringing the people to repentance.  In order to pave the way for God to hear our prayers for peace, our lives need to become prayers for peace.  Everything we say and do needs to come from a place of peace – peace with ourselves, peace with neighbors, peace with our community.  Where there is conflict, we need to be willing to work for a peaceful resolution.  When our alleged national leaders stir up conflicts, we need to tune out their hateful rhetoric and challenge them to consider non-violent alternatives.   We need to advocate for peace – with our voices, with our letters, with our bodies marching in the streets, with our lives if need be – and we need to be peaceful and at peace ourselves while doing so.  By doing these things, our lives can become prayers for peace, and then, in words from Scripture, 2 Chronicles 7:14  “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

I’ll close with these words from St. Francis, which I shared earlier with the children:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.  Let it begin with us, all of us, right here, right now. Amen.