Messengers Preparing the Way

Malachi 3:1-4; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

2nd Sunday of Advent, December 5, 20218, 2024

Pastor Ritva H Williams

On this second Sunday of Advent, we are reminded that God comes to us through particular people, in particular places and times in the past, and here and now. Our scripture readings help us recognize the light of Christ in the midst of the many messages clamoring for our attention everyday. 

First we hear from Malachi, an ancient Israelite priest, who speaks to God’s people in a time of great hardship and disillusionment. The people are home from exile and have rebuilt the temple, but nothing has turned out as they hoped. There is no king, the priestly rulers are greedy and corrupt. The harvests have failed. Everyone is blaming each other for the mess they are in. Maybe, God has abandoned them. 

Malachi promises deliverance, restoration, and renewal, but the process will be fearsome. It will be like a smelter’s fire burning away dross to reveal precious metal. Like scrubbing with Lysol and Chlorox to restore the beauty of things dragged through the mud and buried under piles of garbage. The goal of the process is to purify the sons of Levi — the ancient priesthood running the province of Judah. To bring them back in line with God’s covenant, to remind them what it means to be righteous. To bring them into right relationship with God, neighbor, and self.

In Christ we are all members of the priesthood of believers. This means that Malachi’s message isn’t just about some messenger come and gone long ago and faraway. Malachi’s message is like a drop of water in a pond sending ripples spreading throughout time, seeking fulfillment in every here and now. 

The primary characteristic of righteousness — right relations — is love. Love not as warm fuzzy feelings, but love as a way of life, as a choice to honor the image of God in oneself and in every person we encounter. Right relations means treating all people without exception with dignity and respect, lifting up, encouraging and empowering them. Restoring right relations is tough because it means confronting and owning up to our implicit biases — unconscious racism, misogyny, homo-and-trans-phobia, agism, size-ism, classism, and so forth. It means owning up to our fear, anger, greed, and egotism. The process of being released from these sins can feel like being tested with fire or scrubbed with chlorox. 

The process is well worth the effort, but do not try it without the assistance of an experienced counselor, coach, mentor, or spiritual director. Yet it is possible, and even expected of Christ-followers that we grow in love and righteousness, as we see from Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

A harvest of righteousness is the consequence of living in right relations with God, neighbor, and self producing a world where all flourish.

Moving chronologically through our scripture readings, the second messenger we meet today is John son of Zechariah. His story begins:

 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas …

These are the rulers of the known world, regional lands, and the Judean Temple state. Collectively they hold all the authority and power that wealth, military might, and ancestry can command. Note that God’s message is not given to these VIPs.  

As the son of the priest Zechariah, John could have claimed a place in the Temple establishment but chose not to. As the gospel writer tells us, “The child [John] grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel” (Luke 1:80). John chose the wilderness — a place of desolation and scarcity, vulnerability and danger — as his home where he found safety and divine provision. That is where God found him and nurtured his calling for mission. 

Our world is saturated with social media messages telling us that the people who really matter are presidents and prime ministers, political parties, billionaires and celebrities. Only these politically, militarily, and economically powerful people can make our lives better. The Gospel disagrees: it is not the VIP’s who matter the most, but ordinary people, little people, living in the midst of pain and injustice, scarcity and hunger, isolation and violence. It is these people whom God seeks to empower, giving them voices to cry out: “prepare the way of the Lord.”

John the Baptizer’s message invites people to undergo a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” — a dunking in the River Jordan signifying that one had changed the way they think about everything with the result that they were released and set free from their “sins.”Washed clean, they are now ready to go on with a new mindset, a new lifestyle, and a clearer sense of mission and purpose.

The gospel writer presents John the Baptizer as fulfilling of Isaiah’s message about “a voice crying out in the wilderness:

Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Isaiah’s message evokes images of road construction: bulldozers filling in valleys, leveling hills, smoothing out bumpy sections, realigning twists and turns. While Isaiah might have been dreaming of building a literal highway from Babylon to Jerusalem, he also points to something much deeper. As Professor Judith Jones writes, 

“Preparing [the way of the Lord] means rethinking systems and structures that we see as normal but that God condemns as oppressive and crooked. It means letting God humble everything that is proud and self-satisfied in us, and letting God heal and lift up what is broken and beaten down … John [the Baptizer] calls us to let God’s bulldozers reshape the world’s social systems and the landscape of our own minds and hearts. God’s ways are not our ways. But God’s way leads to salvation.” 

Isaiah’s message is another drop in the pond sending out ripples into all times and places. The Gospel writer saw John the Baptizer as embodying the voice in the wilderness calling for major changes. Isaiah promises that God’s way of leveling, lifting up and realigning the social and cultural norms leads to salvation —to healing and wholeness— for “all flesh” — for all human beings without exception, and for all creatures. Healing and wholeness come at the end of a process that begins with cleansing our thoughts, words and actions of everything that stands in the way of  right relations . It’s not easy, but it is necessary, and God promises to be with us always in spirit, and in flesh through the messengers Christ sends into our lives. Today’s good news is summed up in this poem by Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes (unfoldinglight.org)

Luke names every locus of power, every place where the Word of the Almighty ought to land…
and it does not come there,
but in the wilderness, to a powerless peasant without office or authority, a man named John.
Don’t look to the mighty for the power of God. Look to the lowly.

Grace always rises from below.

In your own heart, yes, there are your strengths,

those things you’re most comfortable with, what gets noticed and praised— 

but look also to the wilderness, among the quiet, overlooked things,
the tender places, the sorrows and wounds, the outlier hopes and fragile dreams,
for the movement of the Spirit.

The Holy invades from the bottom up.

Thanks be to God!