John the Baptist
Second Sunday in Advent
December 9, 2018
Rev. Bingham Powell
Today is the Second Sunday in Advent, which means that, as we do every year on the Second and Third Sundays in Advent, we hear about John the Baptist, that cousin of Jesus who was sent by God to prepare the way of the Lord, as the Gospel says. This is the perfect thing to spend time thinking about in Advent, the season of preparation of the coming of Christ, the coming of the Lord into our lives and into the world.
The story of John the Baptist shows up in two parts of our readings today. He showed up, of course, in the Gospel, but also the canticle that we sang, The Song of Zechariah. Zechariah is John’s dad.
Zechariah was a priest. The title priest does not mean the same thing that it does now. A priest was not someone who was lifted up by a congregation, discerned a call, and sent off for formation and education, and then ordained for leading a congregation. Rather, a priest was a position you were born into. If you were of that lineage, you were a priest. It wasn’t a full time job. There were many priests, and they would get called up for duty every once in a while. They would have to come to the temple in Jerusalem and offer sacrifices on behalf of the people. So Zechariah had his number drawn, and it was his turn to go to Jerusalem. He joined other priests there, and they drew lots to decide who would do what job. Zechariah was given the job of offering up the incense sacrifice. I’ve read that this is a rather prestigious position. Apparently you got to do it one time in your life, so this was a special moment for Zechariah. He entered into the Holy of Holies, which would have been a space he entered alone to offer the sacrifice. While in there, an angel of the Lord appeared to him. It was Gabriel, the same angel that appeared to Mary. And what does Gabriel like to say? “Be not afraid”, because it is rather scary when he shows up. He tells Zechariah that he is going to have a son and that the son is going to be a prophet who is going to prepare the way of the Lord, and that he is to name him John. This is all rather surprising to Zechariah because, as a Bible translation puts it, he and his wife Elizabeth were getting on in years. They were too old for this to happen. Zechariah questions Gabriel and asks the angel if he is sure about this. Gabriel doesn’t like that much and punishes Zechariah. Now I find that rather unfair. Abraham and Sarah also questioned the angel that announced an impossible birth, and they got ribbed a little bit, but they didn’t get punished. Mary also questioned the angel and she doesn’t get punished. Perhaps the angel had learned after Zechariah that people are going to question you when you announce crazy, impossible things like that. But Gabriel punishes Zechariah by taking away his ability to speak until this thing comes to pass. So when Zechariah leaves the Temple, he cannot tell people what happened. He had been in there so long that they knew something was up, and they guessed that it might have been some kind of vision.
After Zechariah’s term of his service he returned home, and Elizabeth was pregnant. Nine months later they had a little baby boy. On the eighth day, as was custom, they took him to be circumcised and named. When asked what the baby was to be named, Zechariah, who could not speak, got a writing instrument and wrote the name John. Suddenly the curse, the punishment was lifted from him because all had been fulfilled. Zechariah cries out, sings out, calls out this canticle that we sang this morning: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has come to his people and set them free. He sings a song of praise, thanking God for the wonderful things that God has done. It is common in these songs of praise to name some of the wonderful things that God has done for his people throughout time. We sometimes call this the history of salvation, listing the ways that God has worked in this world to bring people out of whatever challenges, be it slavery, exile, pain, suffering or illness. Zechariah recounts and praises the ways that God has helped them through the Covenant, through prophets, through Abraham. Whenever you recite one of the histories of salvation, you don’t do it to be nostalgic about the past. You do it because there is something in the present that needs to be stated. You do it because that story of the past is our story in this moment. So you see a shift in that canticle when Zechariah goes from praising God and speaking to God to speaking to his newborn son. He says, You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of sins. In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us. It is a new morning and this history of salvation is happening again. God is breaking into the world, and this little baby is going to be the one to proclaim it. And of course, that dawn, we know, is Jesus Christ who is going to be born in Bethlehem. John is going to proclaim that, announce that, and get the people ready for that.
In the tender compassion of our God. I wonder if these are the words that Zechariah would sing to his son to put him to sleep at night. Was this his lullaby? Because this is exactly what John ends up doing. This identity, this vocation that the angel told Zechariah, that Zechariah sang to his son, is what we hear John doing in the Gospel today. He went into all the region around the Jordan proclaiming the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins as it is written in the book in the words of the prophet Isaiah, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain be made low, the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places made smooth. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
John goes and proclaims this good news, this vision that God has for the world, this dream, this imagination that crooked things become straight and rough places become smooth. And whatever valley of the shadow of death that we may find ourselves in will be lifted up. There is not a certain place for people to be put up on mountains because they are so much better than everybody else, but all isbrought low and we all become the same before the Lord our God. It is the vision that God has for us, the children of God. That is what John goes about proclaiming, a tender, compassionate message of this vision.
Notice what John has to do as part of that. He is to proclaim the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now I know we are Episcopalians and don’t like to talk about sin. But here’s the thing: we have to. I don’t know why it is that we don’t like to talk about sin. It might be the ways that we have misunderstood sin over the years by declaring some things as sin that weren’t, or declaring some things not a sin that were. We abused a lot of people in the process by being so judgmental about sin. That might be part of it. It might be because we feel some sort of shame around it, that maybe we view God as a punisher, like the angel Gabriel punishes Zechariah. We might somehow think that God will curse us if we confess our sins. Maybe if we just ignore it, God won’t notice, as if that is how it works. And yet it is the tender compassion of God that is dawning upon us. The thing about sin is that sin is what gets in the way of God’s dream becoming a reality. So before we can do anything to help bring about this vision that John is proclaiming, we have to first acknowledge and name and ask for forgiveness in order to recognize and let go and be reconciled. Otherwise, we’re going to keep doing it and keep getting in the way of God’s dream, God’s vision becoming anything close to a reality. It may be difficult, it may be hard, but the first task is to “be not afraid”, as the angel says, and admit to things we have done wrong in this life and that got in the way of God’s vision. I have somehow rewarded crookedness, I have somehow made something rough in somebody’s life and I need to be reconciled to them. That person that I did it to, or those people that we do it to as a society bear the image of God, so the sin against them was also a sin against God. I must therefore also ask God for forgiveness.
We need to remember it is the tender compassion of God that forgives us. We need not be afraid of this task, but know that in it is a love so great that we have never felt anything like it before: a lightness and a letting go that brings light into the dark places of this world and brings life into the dead places of this world.
In this Advent season we prepare not only our homes, or our church with greenery, presents, and music. We also need to prepare our hearts for this vision that God has for us. The first part of that process is to sweep the dust away, to let go of it, and name and acknowledge those places where we have fallen short so that we can find that tender compassion and the light that shines in the darkness.
AMEN
