Good News and...Fire?

Here are the readings for Advent II, 2018 (Year C).

Preachers are supposed to be carrier pigeons of Good News. But by now you’ve already figured out that today’s scriptures are full of dubious looking “Good News.” I’m not saying it’s not Good News, I’m just saying it all sounded painful to me. Malachi, perched at the end of the Christian Old Testament, at the end of the beginning - standing therefore in maybe the most Advent position imaginable, waiting, watching, proclaiming -  promises a refiner’s fire, gift of God to purify each and every one of us. Oh boy. Just what I wanted for Christmas. Then, Luke’s gospel, recalling Isaiah, proclaims the return of the cosmic chiropractor, making crooked things right, so that the cracked patches of individual pavement we’d like to call our individual lives can be made again into the way of the Lord. Realignment as Good News?

And not just our individuals lives, but our communal and religious lives, too. After all, Jesus is very much in keeping with the Jewish prophetic tradition before him when he challenges the religious leaders with respect to the ways they distort God’s intention, sometimes on purpose, sometimes without even trying. That’s just to say, God knows things get twisted.

But the Chiropractor’s coming! There's your Good News. The high will be brought low. The low brought high. Not for the sake of the exalting or humbling but for the sake of the road’s restoration: prepare ye the way of the Lord. Call it judgment if you want to, but the bottom-line is that potholes spoil a good parade. Smooth out the streets. Prepare for the Presence. Let everyone with a lamp to light keep it lit in anticipation of the coming Christ. From every corner of our holy texts today the Advent promise is that things that have forgotten what they’re for will be reminded and, in the reminding, be made whole.

There are parables that have warned us about Good News like this. Jesus, telling the story of vineyard workers who forgot that they’d been hired by the vineyard owner. They didn’t exactly forget. They adapted to their situation and then preferred their adaptation. They’d replaced waiting for the owner’s return with hoping that the owner might never return, justifying all kinds of exploitation and violence, toward other people, toward the land, by their hope. They were accommodated to crookedness. No, it’s not like they forgot, exactly, but more that they buffeted their lives with busyness and other things expressly designed, sometimes, to make it harder to remember. Maybe because there’s profit to be made in the forgetting. Maybe because it’s painful to wait for another when the wait seems long. In any case, they’ve long since grown ambivalent, if not hostile (and sometimes downright hostile), to anything that would change the status quo. Question: do other things distract us from remembering or does remembering distract us from the other things? It’s a question of where you start, I guess, or where you have in mind to go.

I recently read, in a birding memoir of all things, this remarkable observation. Dan Koeppel writes, “I found myself wondering how much of what we end up doing - or being - is inevitable, and how much is choice?...Most of us have met that moment where we suddenly realize the things that we once sought are now falling into a different order of priorities. Sometimes, we have to find a way to change our lives, to re-embrace that which seems to be vanishing. Other times, we simply abandon our dreams.”

We forget who we are. What we’re for.

Sometimes, to remember, we have to find a way to change our lives, to re-embrace that which seems to be vanishing. That sounds so very Advent. So very Malachi to God’s People. So very John the Baptist on the river’s edge.

What John the Baptist was doing on the river’s edge was proclaiming a baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins. Repentance means to change one’s mind, which is another way of saying, I think, that repentance is the ability to be surprised by God. "Once I was sure that God’s love meant only X, Y, and Z. But look, a new thing! Who knew?" You still get the full force of the mind-changing word, but I hope this take on repentance gets us past all the turn and burn characterizations to which the word is so often prone. Most of all, I hope you see that if repentance is the ability to be surprised by God, you can only exercise this ability by tending with your life to the presence of God. This is why repentance, for Christians, is ongoing. It’s only partly because we stubbornly turn our backs on God from time to time. It’s just as much or more about the reality that God isn’t static. God moves! Behold, a Savior is born of Mary in Bethlehem!

When was the last time you were surprised by God?

John the Baptist proclaims a baptism of repentance, which is a turning, an attuning, like a flower turning to face the sun that soars across the sky; is a turning that sometimes gets reduced to moralism, see the naughty/nice list referenced by insipid crooners on your radio dial this time of year, but true repentance names a greater turning, a careful tending to light and life. So Advent measures time in candles and prayers and songs and silence. For a few pregnant weeks, we make a clock of these things. So it follows that the baptism of repentance proclaimed by John is the farthest thing from an exercise in should-ing or shaming: it is the reorientation of the heart toward what is real and true and lasting. Repentance is relational attention, the changed and changing understanding of one who lives in a relationship of love with God.

The repentance - and the surprise - in Luke’s gospel today is that the new thing God is doing doesn’t start with the list of the pompous and powerful that precedes the introduction of John. In fact, it’s almost like we get a comprehensive people and places where the new thing is not beginning. Emperor Tiberius? Nope. Pontius Pilate? Try again. Herod the ruler of Galilee? Not there, either. The ruler of Iturea and Trachonitis? Getting colder. Lysanius, ruler of Abilene? Sigh. Oh, I know. We’re in church. It must be the religious folks. The high priests! Annas and Caiaphas. No, not them. But there, in the wilderness, you’ll have to turn to see him, John. Proclaiming the baptism of repentance, of turning toward God and so away from the kingdoms that make it harder to remember.

Sometimes, if you want to see where God is moving, watch the news. See who’s making headlines. Then, turn away. Look elsewhere. Maybe to the sidelines, but maybe in the opposite direction. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. This, after all, is what we’re for. It’s a vocation we share with John. The high will be brought low. The low brought high. Call it judgment if you want to, but the bottom-line is that potholes spoil a good parade. Prepare for the presence. The promise of Advent is that things that have forgotten what they’re for will be reminded and, in the reminding, be made whole.

As it is written in the book of the words of the prophet 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.'"

Amen.