Ready

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday December 6, 2009, the 2nd Sunday in Advent.

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

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

I have been a fan of “Godspell” for years. I first found out about the musical at First Presbyterian in Overland Park, Kansas in 1974, just a couple of years after the movie release. The Reverend Doctor Donald Evans did a Sunday youth study of the musical and connected it more directly to the gospel. I remember him commenting that the church organist, a woman this twelve-year-old thought of as an old lady, would have loved playing “Turn Back, Old Man.” But as was the case with so much of my teen-age theological development, it really didn’t stick.

Godspell really began to mean something to me just twelve years ago, after meeting Marie. So compared to many, I am a Johnny-come-lately of “Godspell” love, but that’s fine with me, it became important to me when it was right for me. So of course when I read today’s gospel passage, this voice of John the Baptist singing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” thunders in my head. Then I let it thunder in my ears.

The next song asks the musical question, “When will God save the people?”

John takes this on in our reading from Luke’s gospel, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” John echoes the words of the prophet Isaiah, the words of preparation for all of Israel. John tells a people who have always sought their messiah that he was coming to save the people. It is time to prepare. John tells a people who have been waiting for a prophetic voice since the words of Malachi over 400 years earlier that their messiah was coming to save the people. It is time to prepare.

Make his paths straight. It’s not as if we have to take a scythe and cut back the long grasses, so how do we make his paths straight? What do we do to prepare the way of the Lord? The Reverend Jeff Parker asks three questions to help congregations make straight his paths. He asks:

What are we; what is the Church living for?
What are we willing to die for?
What excites you?

When we answer these questions, both as individuals and as a congregation, we tell the Lord how we prepare the way. When we answer these questions, we tell the world how we will prepare the way. When we execute the preparations, we actually do the work of making his paths straight.

William Sloane Coffin[1] quotes Teilhard de Chardin saying, “The world will belong tomorrow to those who brought it the greatest hope.” Coffin follows this asking “What can we [the Church] bring the world if not hope?”

Coffin continues, “I want to irrigate the community with hope, because without hope we are all literally hopeless, creatures of despair. If we cannot feel something more, we will become something less, just as if we cannot look to something above us, we will surely sink to something below us.”

So here are the questions again:

What are we; what is the Church living for?
What are we willing to die for?
What excites you?

By Coffin’s reckoning, the church lives to give hope. The church lives to give hope. As the Body of Christ on earth, it is our place; it is our mission to bring hope to the world. This is what we are to live for. How’s that for almost answering the question. We live to give hope. We live to bring hope to the hopeless lest we become less than what the Lord has called us to be. This answer is almost as vague as a beauty contestant saying that she hopes for world peace. Still, it is undeniably what we are here for.

This quest, this vocation may seem overly vague, then again to others it may seem overly specific. I have had trouble with both extremes lately. But as ethereal and other-worldly or as dead solid perfect as it may seem; the passage from our Gospel reading begins with something very, very specific.

When we read the first verses from chapter three, we learn about the powerful people of the day. Tiberius was the emperor in Rome, Pilate was Governor of Judea, and Herod ruled Galilee. In the Temple, Annas and Caiphas were the high priests. John, the son of Zechariah was in the wilderness. Jesus wasn’t even in this part of the picture.

There are a good many things we can take from this part of the reading. We can talk about the political climate of the time. There are many things known about Tiberius from history that are not from scripture. The chronicles of history are also filled with facts and stories about the Judean contingent from this reading too. We can also pick apart the economics of the era and the face of the church.

If we wanted to, we could rip apart every detail, every fact, and try to discern what is accurate, what is exaggeration, and what is pure fiction. We could get a full cable news show, or even series about the history found in these very verses. What am I saying? Dozens of these shows have been produced and reproduced since the golden age of television. But there is one thing all of the history will never quite say to us, one thing that is important to us today.

What these verses show is that there is a context, a specific time and place to the ministry of John the Baptist in Galilee. There was a political climate. There was an economic climate. There was a religious climate. Luke’s gospel puts a great big pin into the timeline of history and says this happened here and then.

In this time and place, this is what happened. It is always within a specific time and place that ministry happens. Ministry and faith, evangelism and justice are more than just things studied in Sunday School or in seminary. They are more than just words put into the Sunday morning sermon. They are more than discussion points for some author’s new book. They are things we are called to be and to have and to do here and now. They are things the prophets displayed long ago. They are the things the apostles and the disciples took to the countryside and to their crosses.

Ministry is always done in the context of God’s creation to expand God’s glory. Ministry like the missions that take the Word of God to places where it is unknown in tongues and ways the people understand, this is ministry done in context. Ministry like the Loaves and Fishes Food Bank, ministry like the back pack project, ministry like visiting the sick and imprisoned; these are all set to a specific time and place.

The song asks, “When will God save the people?” John answers “Get ready, because here he comes.” In this time and place we answer, “He has come, he has saved the people, and he continues to save the people.”

So we respond as John calls all of the children of the wilderness to respond. He proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He calls us to turn from the lives we lead now and be anointed in the waters of the baptism he proclaims. John calls us to come to the water to join together as a people turning from the political intrigue of the day and turn to forgiveness of sins.

How do we respond to our own words “He has come, he has saved the people, and he continues to save the people?” When we figure out the answer to that question we will be well on our way to answering Rev. Parker’s questions about what we are willing to live and die for. We will be ready to answer Rev. Parker’s question about what excites us.

These may seem like rhetorical questions, questions that don’t expect answers, but they are not. The answers to these questions take us from receiving a baptism for repentance for forgiveness of sins and actual repentance. It is how the church brings hope to the world. It is the difference between having hope for the future and in the words of de Chardin bringing hope to the world; and being a place to kill an hour on a Sunday. It is the reason we go to church, not just to hear the word, but to participate in bringing the word to life.

Let us prepare the way of the Lord. Let us become a part of the answer to the question, “When will God save the people?” And it is in this motion, going from hearing the word to participating in the word that we make the turn from getting ready, but that is for next week’s sermon.

[1] Coffin, William Sloane, “The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, The Riverside Years.” Vol. 1. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, page 480.