Second Sunday of Advent, Year C; St. Ann's and Chapel of Mary.
Every valley filled in;
every mountain and hill brought low. Why? So we can walk home. In its original
context, this prophecy is addressed to the Israelites during their exile in
Babylon. The Babylonians had come and destroyed the Temple, that placed where
they found God so powerfully, had blinded the king, and had taken the people
away from the Promised Land and brought them to Babylon. A lifetime later, news
comes that there’s a new military power in the Ancient Near East. The Persians
are coming, and they’re likely to conquer the Babylonians, and let the Israelites
come home. The prophet proclaims: This is God’s doing, and now our task is to
walk home, and God is going to do everything in God’s power to help us do that,
even reforming the earth to help us take the most direct route home possible.
The Gospel writers are all convinced that just as
God acted to open up the way for the Israelites to come home in the 500 years earlier,
so God was doing the same thing in the person of John the Baptist, so they take
those prophetic words and apply them to him. At this point, the kind of
not-being-at-home they were experiencing wasn’t geographical. In that sense,
they were home. But there were plenty of forms of not-being-at-home-ness that were
still powerful in their lives, just as there are in ours. If we think back to
the most confining parts of lockdown, for instance, it was precisely when we
were physically in our homes and reluctant or frightened to leave that maybe we
felt most keenly that sense of alienation. We feel distant, separated, from one
another, from God, even from ourselves. We feel that this world is not as is
should be, that it is not our true home.
So, what does John the Baptist propose God is
doing about that and how are we to respond? He proposes a baptism of repentance.
Why? Because God is taking away the sins of the world, and it’s our choice
whether to stick with sin or with God. Luke reminds his reader of all the different
human leaders who were making their claims on the people’s allegiance. If they
felt that their world was not as it should be, that it was not their true home,
they may well have ascribed a large part of the blame to the first name on that
list: Tiberius Caesar. Just the fact that they were occupied by Rome could be enough,
without even remembering the many atrocities for which Tiberius in particular was
responsible. It would be easy to say what’s wrong with the world is Tiberius
Caesar, and then keep on going down the list. But John starts at the other end.
What keeps us from truly being at home, the hills and valleys that block our
way, is not just Roman Imperial Power or the more modern forms of oppression
that take its place. Our own sin does too.
And the “too” is important. John the Baptist
himself spoke truth to power, criticizing Herod, and paid for that with his
head. We do need to think about the big picture wrongs in our world, and we can’t
wait until we’re perfect to confront them. But John the Baptist encourages us
to not be so focused on what’s wrong with other people that we don’t see what’s
wrong with ourselves, and how God stands ready to help with that.
In my first-year seminar this semester, we’ve
been looking at how people have interpreted Jesus’ parables over the last 2,000
or so years, and we ended the semester by reading one of Martin Luther King’s
sermons. It was a sermon preached in 1955, shortly before he played an
important role in helping organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. His text was
Lazarus and the Rich Man, and he pointed out how the Rich Man had refused to
cross the gulf separating him from Lazarus during their earthly life and that
that choice had consequences, the consequence that he couldn’t cross the gulf
in the next life and join Lazarus in heaven. Dr. King went on to compare the Rich
Man to five types of people. He talked about white people who wouldn’t cross or
dismantle the gulf of segregation. He talked about the Indian caste system. He
talked about rich people who refused to help the poor. Then, he talked about
God, who crosses the ultimate gulf to extend to us an offer of salvation. Then,
finally, he identified each and every member of his church as a Rich Man. Now,
remember, this is October 1955. Dr. King is not yet famous. He’s a Baptist
preacher in a black church in Alabama in the 50s. The media are not reporting
what he’s saying to anyone else. He’s not preaching to the wealthy or the powerful,
to Indian Brahmans, or white politicians. He’s naming all of those social ills,
those sins of others that he would dedicate so much of his life to addressing,
but in the last paragraph of his sermon, he points to the people who are already
listening to him, who don’t look to have much power at all and tells them: don’t
see yourselves as Lazarus right now, see the power and the agency you do have,
and see what gulfs you are letting keep you from helping or accompanying
another.
And where might that lead us? It’s actually our first
reading, from Baruch, that gives us a vivid picture of the end. A picture of glory,
of joy, of mercy, of justice. The prophet there addresses Jerusalem, the Holy
City, and bids the city imagine the future where all her exiled children come
home. All are united and that’s where joy is found. That’s home. Every hill and
mountain that stands in the way of that will be no more. And John invites us to
see how our sin is part of those obstacles, and to rejoice, even as we name and
lament that sin, for our God takes away the sins of the world.
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