The season of Advent is about preparing the way for Jesus. In this time of waiting, we prepare our hearts to receive the King of Kings as he comes to us as a little child. There’s a paradox as we hear God’s messengers call us to prepare to receive the Messiah, while also recognizing that it is God who prepares us for grace. God comes to us whether we are ready or not.
This sermon is an adaptation of my 2018 sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent, for which I found helpful Karoline Lewis’ reflection “What’s in a Name?” at Dear Working Preacher. Today’s Scripture readings are Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 1:68-79, and Luke 3:1-6.
Here’s the livestream from Christ the King and the sermon podcast audio.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the one for whom we wait, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
This might be a bit of a lazy sermon opening, but have you noticed that the Christmas season seems to start earlier and earlier each year? Christin and I were watching Cheers earlier this week, and they were complaining about the same thing, so it’s not a new problem. I know there are always people who start putting up lights and decorating before Thanksgiving, but I saw full-blown Christmas displays out in some stores this year in mid-October, before Halloween!
I’m not even making the liturgical calendar complaint that December 25 is technically the first day of the Christmas season, the beginning of Christmas’s 12 days.
We’ve had family members asking for Christmas lists for our children, and we’ve been saying “not until after the Lighthouse fundraiser” and that doesn’t seem too late to me.
I think there’s value in the season of Advent; there’s meaning in taking time to prepare for Christmas, rather than jumping right to the holiday.
It’s so interesting how much Advent calendars are a thing in our culture, even with the rush to Christmas. We have a Sesame Street book advent calendar this year. I’m still waiting for someone to get me a Lego Star Wars one.
Anyway, today is the second week in Advent, the season of preparation, and our theme today is “God prepares us for grace.” And our focus as we prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth is in a bit of a strange place, the beginning not of Jesus’ ministry, but of his cousin, John the Baptist’s.
I said last week that the Advent season plays with time and our stories aren’t in chronological order. The timeline for today’s readings is all over the place.
We have a prophecy from Malachi from four or five hundred years before Jesus’ birth. The psalm we read from Luke 1—psalms are a genre, a category of literature, and there’s more of them in the Bible than just the 150 in the book of Psalms—this Luke 1 psalm is spoken by Zechariah when his son John is 8 days old, just before Jesus is born.
And our Gospel reading from Luke 3 comes about 30 years after the Christmas story, as John is preparing the way for the adult Jesus to start his public ministry.
Look at how the story starts. Luke is a physician by trade, but much more importantly for us, he is a thorough historian.
He wants to establish when these events are taking place, to make sure that we reading his story of Jesus thousands of years later will know this is not just a fairy tale, but a real story of real flesh and blood people.
History is often about human accomplishments—great people who do great things, or invent new machines to change the world. It’s about people who have great ideas, or—perhaps most often—history is about wars and the people and nations who fight in great battles.
Luke anchors his story within human history, but this is God’s story. This is all God’s doing. God is preparing the way for grace to enter the world.
The human history we think is so important, the human recitation of empires and governors and rulers and even high priests, none of that is as important as the fact that the word of God is coming. None of the human accomplishments, none of the human markers or boundaries or ways of understanding the world matter as much as the fact that God is acting. The word of God came.
And who did the word of God come to? Not to the Emperor Tiberius reigning in Rome over the largest human empire the world had ever seen. Not to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor ruling with an iron fist over the rebellious colony of Israel, with his word backed up by the power of the mighty Roman legions.
The word of God does not come to Herod, the Jewish king obsessed with power and buildings or to his brother Philip, or Lysanias the ruler of Abilene, or even to the high priests Annas and Caiaphas.
Luke tells us, “The word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” The word of God came to a nobody, the faithful son of an elderly back-country priest.
And the word of God that comes to John is a word of hope. It’s a proclamation: The Lord is coming. Prepare the way. John serves as the messenger, the herald letting people know the king will be here soon. Get ready!
Part of the challenge of the Advent season is that this is such a familiar story. It’s hard to take time to prepare when we know Christmas is coming whether we’re ready or not.
We have a children’s book at home called Is It Almost Christmas? about a kid who keeps asking over and over if Christmas is here yet, but the parents keep coming up with more preparations to do. Make cookies, put up the tree, decorate, and the kid is just so excited for Christmas to be here.
We should be that excited, right? I wish we could all have the excitement of a little kid experiencing Christmas for the first time.
And yet, I don’t know if most of us are there. We hear the story anew each year, yet the world seems the same. There is still violence, there is still poverty, there is still cancer, and war, and abuse and tragedy.
For the people listening to John, this message has been a long time coming. They’ve grown up hearing that the Messiah will come. They’ve heard all the stories of God’s faithfulness throughout history, stories like John’s father Zechariah proclaims.
Imagine their excitement when they hear it’s actually happening. The Lord is coming, not just sometime in the distant future, but here, now, into this part of history. Imagine their joy!
And yet, I also wonder if they had trouble believing it. Maybe God was faithful in the past, but what about now? What about now when our nation is just a province of a foreign empire?
What about now when the pews/chairs around us seem emptier than they should be? What about when so many people no longer seem to care about faith? There are and have always been plenty of reasons to doubt, plenty of reasons to not get caught up in excitement about some old prophecies.
But the Lord is coming whether we believe it or not, whether our neighbors accept it or not. I think it’s fascinating that the passage John quotes from Isaiah says first, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” You do it. You get ready.
But then it goes on, “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.” Ready or not, the Lord is coming.
We are called to prepare, to repent, to admit that we need a savior, that what we’re doing isn’t working. We’re called to turn towards God, to open our hearts to receive God. And yet, we know we can’t do it all ourselves.
We can’t make it happen. We can’t erase our doubts, we can’t live fully into hope and love. But Christmas comes anyway. God shows up anyway. God loves you whether you love God back or not. God is the one preparing us for grace.
That preparation isn’t always easy. When Malachi promises that the Messiah will come, he says the preparation for God’s people will be like a refiner’s fire, a flame hot enough to melt silver so the impurities can be strained out. The result is something beautiful and pure, but getting there is not easy.
Malachi talks about fuller’s soap. That’s a caustic, alkali compound made with ash, used for bleaching cloth. Again, the result is good, but the process of removing stains is pretty rough. Filling in our valleys, smoothing in our hills, having the crooked parts of our lives made straight is not necessarily easy or pleasant.
Having our hearts prepared for God’s kingdom means having our hearts changed, and that’s often painful.
The word of God that comes to John is a word of hope, but it’s not a simple “everything is all better now” kind of shallow hope. There’s some tough love called for. To truly understand the grace given at Christmas, we need to prepare our hearts with repentance, recognizing our need for a savior. We need the season of preparation.
Next week, we’ll hear more of John’s message, and as a sneak peek, it begins, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
God’s kingdom is coming, and it will bring peace, but this broken, violent world is putting up a good fight. Yet in the midst of the violence, in the midst of the shadows of our world and the shadows within our own hearts, John’s message is good news. God is preparing you for grace.
Today’s Gospel reading ends with the promise, “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
The hope of Advent is not just for the emperors and governors and high priests. It’s also for the ones in the wilderness. It’s for the ones who most need a message of hope to cling to, for the rich and the poor, for the young and the old, for the included and the outcasts.
It’s for those of us 2,000 years later, still waiting and longing for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. All flesh shall see the salvation of God. The King is coming. Happy Advent!