Second Sunday of Advent

Lectionary: 6

Sculpture of children
in the U of M Arboretum

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, 
when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, 
and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, 
and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region 
of Ituraea and Trachonitis, 
and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, 
during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, 
the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah  in the desert.

You remember where you were and what you were doing when the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked by terrorists. You probably remember where you were and what you were doing on both occasions when the Space Shuttles failed and the astronauts were killed. You may be like me, and old enough to remember the day President John Kennedy was shot. There are events that shatter the known world and leave us picking up the pieces. 

And there are events, often quieter, that rebuild our world, like the day "the Word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert." 

Saint Luke wants his reader to place that event precisely in their personal logbooks. The older members of the Christian congregation could certainly recall "the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberias Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod the tetrarch of Galilee." We're talking about real time here, not some remote incident in the legendary past. 

Travelers to Israel often come back with similar experiences. If they don't remember when, they have been where Jesus actually walked and talked, ate and slept, laughed and prayed. Israel is not middle-earth; Jerusalem is not somewhere over the rainbow. 

In our world, in our time, God has intervened. There are those who say this should not happen. The deist's god built the world from scratch and set it on the workbench like a wind-up toy and walked away, leaving it to unwind on its own. The deist Thomas Jefferson pored through the Bible and carefully edited out everything his god should not have done. If you've ever seen his book you know it's pretty small. He discarded the entire Old Testament, all the letters of the apostles and Revelation, and kept select passages of the gospels, after smoothing out their differences. You'll find some good advice in the scraps he retained, but no salvation. If he didn't agree with it, it didn't make the cut. 

More than two centuries after Thomas Jefferson and twenty centuries after John the Baptist, living in a world neither could imagine, we can still receive the encouragement of Saint Paul: 

I am confident of this,
that the one who began a good work in you
will continue to complete it
until the day of Christ Jesus.

The work of God continues because the Word of God still comes to us. It is a Word even more familiar than the ancient histories of Jerusalem, Rome and revolutionary Philadelphia; and it retains the power to move us into this twenty-first century. 

Again we hear, A voice of one crying out in the desert: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.

As another Christmas approaches, a feast that remains ever ancient, ever new, we ask the Lord to speak to our hearts and clear away the rubble of sin. Make us ready to receive the Spirit which filled Mary, excited John, moved Jesus and gathered a Church. The world will go in its direction, forever drifting into war; continually negotiating cease-fires and temporary truces; and navigating booms, bubbles and bursts. Many suppose the world's stock markets, driven as they are by greed and fear, determine our fate. 

But we know our God is still in charge. He will come to save us.