The season of Advent is the four weeks prior to Christmas Day. Advent is not specifically a time to prepare for Christmas, but a period to reflect on and prepare for the coming of Christ, starting with the first Sunday's typical focus on the return of Christ at the end of the age.
Today is the second Sunday of Advent, Year A. Its lectionary passage is Matthew 3.1-12:
3In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his
paths straight.’” 4Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.7But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 9Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 11“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
In the 1991 movie Grand Canyon, a man’s sports car breaks down in a bad neighborhood where the young toughs wear expensive clothes and carry cheap guns. The driver calls on his cell phone for a tow truck but before it arrives the local toughs surround his car and threaten him with considerable harm. Just in time, the tow truck arrives and its driver, played by Danny Glover, starts to hook the car onto the truck. The tough guys protest. So Glover takes the gang leader aside and tells him, “The world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything's supposed to be different than what it is here."
John the Baptist saw it that way, too.. He confronted the power hierarchy of his day and place, men who were secure in their position and who had all the right ancestors in a land where ancestry meant something. John's message was threefold:
- the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be.
- God intentions for human life and community have not been realized.
- But help is on the way.
We see daily a disconnection between how things are and how we can imagine them to be. We submit to and commit wrongdoings so commonplace that we hardly notice them anymore. I still remember the indignity of high school gym class during basketball season. The same two guys appointed themselves team captains every time. The rest of us formed a meat line and the two self-anointed captains took turns choosing their team’s members. Basketball was my worst sport. I was always the next-to-last kid chosen. I remember the smirks on the gym teacher’s face as we dregs of basketball talent were picked over after the more talented kids had been selected, and the contempt on the team captains’ faces for us runts of the litter. And I remember my own smug self satisfaction that there were always one or two kids who were even less desirable than I was.
Adults are not really nicer than children. Adults are just more devious in the ways we harm others, or accept being harmed as just the way things are. We are more ingenious in our justifications, but we adulterate our lives and the lives of others with greater magnitude: we spoil our relationships, pollute nature, bomb cities.
Most people tend to think of human behavior in psychological terms, so they have no real way to grapple with the fact that things not like they're supposed to be. But John the Baptist addressed the problem head on. The concept is sin, a word much in disfavor nowadays. Somehow “sin” has come in popular culture to be understood as the word used by self-appointed moralists to put the rest of society on a tight moral budget. Sin is a category of conduct used by the puritanical, moral arbiters of culture: the fear that someone, somewhere, may actually be having a good time.
The prophets of old would have been impatient with such juvenile concepts of sin. They did not confuse sin with mere error or innocent folly. They understood sin to be a deeply inbred fabric of human nature. Theology professor Cornelius Plantinga explained it this way:
“The Bible presents sin in an array of images: Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it – both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack, or evade, or neglect their divine calling. ... even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and, then, resistance to divine restoration of it. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways.”
Sin perverts what is excellent in human nature and amplifies what is evil.
The fact that so many things are so excellent about human nature makes contrasts with sin all the more disturbing. We know something is crooked only because we enjoy the things that are straight. We remember times when human beings seemed so close to everything God wanted them to be, and then we know that for all the progress we have made, we still have so far to go. There is much redemptive work yet to be done in humankind.
Like John the Baptist, we dream of a time when human crookedness will be straightened out and the roughness of life will be smoothed over. The prophets looked to a time when “the deserts would flower, the mountains would run with wine, weeping would cease, and people could go to sleep without weapons on their laps. People would work in peace, their work having meaning and point. A lion could lie down with a lamb – the lion cured of all carnivorous appetite. All nature would be fruitful, benign, and filled with wonders and all human beings would be knit together” as a new family (Plantinga).
But it’s a long haul from here to there. In the interim, the advent of the savior of the world into human form and life in Bethlehem was understood by John the Baptist as judgment upon the world. The advent, this dawning of a new work of God in the world, was not seen by John as an occasion for children’s pageants. We have made Christmas into a kiddie event, with visions of sugar plums, sounds of sleigh bells, and visits by a jolly old elf, who never actually leaves the coals and ashes threatened for bad behavior. Maybe we’ve sucked all the deepest significance out of Christmas, the advent of God’s personal presence in the world. Maybe John the Baptist got it right: the baby born in the manger will bear a winnowing fork in his hands to clear the threshing floor.
For if we and God alike envision a better world to come, then we have to face the judgment that the world as it exists is not the way it is supposed to be. If we accept that, then we cannot point the finger at others because our own resistance to God’s redemption is sin, too. The only way to move the world along to what it should be is to start with oneself. We must daily strive to bear fruit worthy of our calling, and we cannot rely on some religious birthright for justification. John said that God could make stones into children of Abraham, so God can make good church members out of rusty beer cans lying along the roadside if wants to. Being on a membership list is less the point than being a disciple.
Repentance and confession are the first steps of the journey to the transformed world. They are the first steps in shedding sin. We should flee from sin because God is not just arbitrarily offended by it. God hates sin because it separates us not only from his own being, but from the way things are supposed to be. God stands for a peaceful world of justice, and therefore stands against whatever hinders it. Our sin hinders it.
We are less than three weeks from the manger now. When we reach the manger we will find that in the birth of Jesus is the coming of the Kingdom of God in power, the beginning of the transformation of the world that is into the world that should be. It is an ongoing work. God comes into this world to change it and that it begins with us. It begins when we kneel at the manger. It takes us beyond Bethlehem to Nazareth and then, finally, to Jerusalem itself to a hilltop named the Place of the Skull, Golgotha.
Perhaps we do not really want to hear that. We generally want Christmas to be carols and good cheer, parties and fine food. We want it to be an escape from the world, a ceasing of the daily grind. And it can be, but only if we go into the manger prepared to receive God’s greatest gift, his very life and being, and give in return our own lives and being.
Images that seem to John to be fearful – winnowing, gathering and burning – are really transformed into statements of God’s grace by Christ because Jesus was greater than John. Former Yale chaplain John W. Vannorsdall wrote that the coming of Christ assures us that God comes to us with the message of love, not wrath. “I am prepared for the anger of God,” Vannorsdall wrote, “and believe that God has a right to wrath. What is so amazing is that when God comes among us, God comes not with violence but with love, even as a child vulnerable to our further hurt” (“He Came to His Own Home,” 24 December 1978).
As we experience God's presence in Advent, we are led to begin or continue a life-long practice of measuring our lives by the call of the gospel. We can rightly celebrate the baby in the manger only by trusting that God goes with us every step of the way. Writer and theologian Madeline L'Engle wrote,
God did not wait until the world was ready,
until the nations were at peace.
God came when the heavens were unsteady
and prisoners cried out for release.
God did not wait for the perfect time
God came when the need was deep and great.
In joy God came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt
To a world like ours of anguished shame
God came and God's light would not go out.
We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice
for to share our grief, to touch our pain
God came with Love. Rejoice! Rejoice!
No, things are not like they are supposed to be. But God's promises are true. “In a world that assumes the status is quo, that things have to be the way they are and that we must not assume too much about improving them, ... God’s people are [to be] fundamental indicators that wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope” is a reasonable thing (Miller, Theology Today, 1988).
