A Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock
[Malachi 3:1-4;Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6]
The way today’s Advent 2 gospel begins is both stunning and telling. St. Luke (whom tradition holds to be a physician but clearly one who could write very well and with transformational effect) – St. Luke crafts a beginning to the action of his gospel in a rather artful manner. So, again, listen to how this day’s gospel starts.
In the fifteenth year of the rule of Caesar Tiberius – it was while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea; Herod, ruler of Galilee; his brother Philip, ruler of Iturea and Trachonitis; Lysanias, ruler of Abilene: during the Chief-Priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas – John, Zachariah’s son, out in the desert at the time, received a message from God.1
Luke Timothy Johnson, the Roman Catholic biblical scholar, refers to this opening scene as St. Luke’s “drumroll”. And I find it interesting to note that St. Luke’s crafting of these first six verses of his third chapter plays the same literary, story-telling role that is akin to what millions of movie-goers have continued to experience when viewing the first “Star Wars” movie. Remember the “drumroll” of that opening scene?
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…[and then the cinematic crawl from outer space’s infinitude to the present moment…] It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
Brilliantly, both in the case of the movie and the gospel (and you could also add the opening scene of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town), the transcendent context is connected to something very specific, moving the observer from the grand and wide narrative of larger history to the particulars of a specific story. It is a literary telescoping device meant to carry observers to a story within a story and then back again.
This is the type of story-telling that Advent employs, chronologically connecting2 our life’s existence as people in history within the enveloping drama of God being on the move. In this manner and with today’s gospel lesson, St. Luke emphasizes the Advent of Jesus as the moment in history on which the Creator God acts not only to fulfill his Covenanted promise of rescue and new life; but also to announce that this long-awaited hope for action is now being accomplished most uniquely and intimately by God – which is to say, by “Emmanuel: God with us”.
Luke’s third chapter is a beginning: a beginning of God’s climactic rescue and redemption story. In these verses, Luke telescopes us into the known world’s overriding reality. First, in the person of Caesar Tiberius and his world-dominating empire; then zooming us into the machinations of the Galilean and Judean civil and religious powers; and ultimately implicitly drawing our attention to the Jerusalem Temple, held by the Hebrews as the place where God dwells among the people.
The rather marvelous point of this Lucan gospel story’s “crawl” is that this narrative is clearly meant, not just for one, local place, but for the entire world. Be it the Jedi remnant or the goings on in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, or the events in the Judean wilderness, this Advent Sunday’s story is crafted with specific care. Like a space capsule returning home, we re-enter earth’s familiar atmosphere but not as the same people who originally left. In the interim, we have seen and heard things that do not permit us to remain the same. Advent.
So it is that in the specificity of this Second Advent Sunday we now fast-forward to meet John the Baptist in the year 29 BCE (that is, “Before the Christian Era”). Unlike in the gospel presentations of Matthew, Mark, and John, Luke’s depiction of John the Baptist does not concern itself with what John looks like or how austere and disciplined his lifestyle was. Rather, Luke simply tells us that John is Zachariah’s son and that in the starkness of the wilderness, John the Baptist receives God’s defining Word. It is a Word the Baptizer must proclaim and do so publicly in the manner of a town crier. And his Word is summarized in terms of a “baptism of repentance”.
From life defined by the empire to its trickling down into the civic and religious details of its constituent parts, Luke steadily draws our attention to John the Baptist’s focused preaching of “repentance”. As the essential message of Advent, what does this call mean? How does repentance play in our lives? As we strive and struggle to live as faithful followers of Jesus in this “in-between” time, how does “repentance” work? And perhaps more to the point, why (for the most part) is repentance so hard for us?
What John proclaimed in his wilderness life and ministry contained a two-sided experience. One side is an invitation. The other side provides an offering. Both the invitation and the offering come from God – no matter what.
The meaning of “repentance” is “turn around” – that is, to “turn one’s life around” – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. “Turn around”. This is the core element and experience of Advent. In its invitation, repentance, with its turning around, can be threatening because it entails transformation of who and what we are. As an offering, repentance’s turning around can also be a joyful release from the confinement of fear and death and from the puniness of our plans and expectations for our life.
And so, John the Baptist calls us to “repentance”: to “turn around because we are evidently off-course. Our internal compass is amiss and in need of recalibration. We think we’re heading in the right direction; but clearly we are not only off-base. We are so often lost – and too proud, too invested, too stuck in our own stuff to deal with what our life needs.
Repentance as invitation and as offering: It is our invitation from God to address what we hold at our soul’s center, what we allow to be the reality that shapes who and what we are. From my experience, most folks have a “fuzzy” sense of what lies at our center. Mostly, it seems that our inner lives are often like Velcro. We want to stick to something that anchors us, but in the process of trying various stabilities, all we do is pick up lint and fuzz and other forms of life’s detritus. The result is that our souls get clogged up. “Repentance”, on the other hand, is an invitation – an invitation from God – to turn around, and at the very least risk seeing God and in turn, seeing ourselves as God sees us. And what is there to see? This: [stand before the people and extend arms fully]. This is what God looks like. This is what there is to see, if we dare to unclog ourselves, turn around, and look.
Of course, this “turning around” and risking seeing the Holy One’s unalterable response to us is also the reason that “repentance” can be so hard for us. Oh sure, the lint and life-detritus that we have picked up in our vain and foolish attempts to replace God – or at least ignore God – they need attention. They need changing. But the real tension we have with “repentance” is how much it will change us. Ironically, this is what love does. And complain as much as we do about others needing to change or the country or the church or my spouse or my job – or the weather to change, all of this is self-inflicted distraction and denial because facing God and turning toward this love is hard, and it is painful because love changes us from our fearful habits and orientation and calls us to embrace what we need and only God can provide. The invitation to turn around is one thing. To accept and respond to the offer of life with God is …well … a matter of “thy will be done”, which requires loosening our grip on our life so that we may know God and God’s life-giving presence.
In terms of repentance and turning around to God, in my nine-plus years as your priest, I have told you the story I encountered fifty years ago. I was in seminary and engaged in my Clinical Pastoral Education (something our friend and former parish intern, Elle Morgan, is going through right now). When I face the reality of repentance, this story comes to mind.
I was one of the CPE Chaplains. I had been given coverage responsibility for a cancer ward. First thing on a sunny, summer morning, I dutifully (and oh-so naively) rolled into making my first call on a patient to see how he was doing. As an inveterate smoker, he had just had his throat surgically rearranged to mitigate his life-threatening disease. With his head wrapped in gauze and looking like a human “Q-Tip”, I spied him quietly sitting in a chair, warming himself in the sun, and smoking a cigarette through his tractotomy.
The lesson I learned then with a startling and unavoidable clarity was that the way we live may be killing us, but at least we have the comfort of familiarity and doing what we want!
“Repent.” Turn around. Come home. Invitation. Offering. God.
I’ll close now with something I shared in my NOW article this past week. It is the best, most succinct expression of the importance of “repentance” – both as God’s invitation and God’s offering. Here it is again.
To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, “I’m sorry,” than to the future and saying, “Wow!”3
So be it. Amen.
1. Luke 3:1-3 –Eugene Peterson. The Message
2. Andrew McGowen. The Place of John: Advent 2.Yr. C
3. Frederick Buechner. Wishful Thinking, p. 79
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