Readings:
Philippians 1:3-11, Luke 3: 1-14,18
Let
us pray: Open our hearts and minds, our ears and our eyes to your word for each
of us this day O God. May our listening
and our response be held in the presence of your Spirit, in Jesus name. Amen.
What on earth are we doing with the
uncompromising blunt message of John the Baptist in the middle of the Advent
season? Hearing John’s words of insult
and insinuation, of discomfort and judgement is strong stuff in the midst of
the coming of love to the world. The joy
and hope of the nativity alongside the vehement judgemental words of John
calling those who have come to hear him“ a brood of vipers” and speaking of
axes chopping down unfruitful trees and the wood being thrown into the fire. Uncompromising
and blunt indeed: there was a suggestion that John must have skipped the course
on pastoral counselling at theological college when he went through!
I wonder what it would have been like for
those people at that time – was John the Baptist a incongruent, jarring note in
a otherwise smoothly functioning faith journey, an out of the blue attack on
their faith? Other things may have
caused them sleepless nights: for sure there would have been disquiet regarding
their political situation with the Romans in charge and some worries about how
their future as a nation might pan out but, and maybe because of that, did they
hold their faith, their relationship with God as pretty healthy, on track? Were they then a bit taken aback at this
message of judgement and truth from a man who, from our reading anyway, seeded
to be a no frills sort of guy popping up out of nowhere and going straight for
the jugular, refusing to couch his message in dazzling rhetoric or gentle
persuasion.
I remember going to a meeting once in my
library career – just another meeting with an agenda and business to discuss –
and being on the receiving end of someone who said it as she saw it and it
wasn’t pretty and it was so completely at odds with how I thought things were
going that I was gobsmacked and unable to respond – for the moment anyway. Was it like that for John’s listeners do you
think? But then they, and I, seemed to
react in the same way – wanted to know what was behind this – what was the
cause of this outburst, these accusations and how might it be fixed, even if
they weren’t sure what was wrong.
And so they asked “What then should we do?
Ray Gaston in a sermon on this passage
suggests that the first thing we need to do is to listen to John the Baptist,
over and over and over again. And that
his message can be summed up in three acknowledgements by us: the world is a
mess, a place of sin, we need to know this is not the way it should be and we
are required to make it different. In
other words he suggests that before we can welcome the love that is the Christ
Child we need to go through the pain that is
John the Baptist’s message to us.
To welcome the light of the world, we have to acknowledge the darkness
into which it shines. And then we can
turn round to the darkness and say: this light is a protest: a refusal to
conform. It says to the darkness: ‘I beg
to differ’
And, you know something, the people listened,
they had respect for him and they took the verbal attack on the chin. ‘What can we do’ they asked and were given
some incredibly practical advice.
To those who have accumulated wealth: if
you have two coats give away one of them – (that is a sobering definition of
wealth to us today isn’t it?) To the tax
collectors, those who are living and working in a corrupt system – do not be
part of that corruptness. To the
soldiers: do not bully others from your position of power.
That is what was said to the people of
John’s time. What might the advice be to
us in our time do you think?
To those who come to John today because
they are feeling empty despite their accumulated wealth, their comfortable life
style and their secure assets, John says: stop trying to bolster up your own
sense of worth with possessions – try giving things away instead and see where
it takes you. You might be surprised.
Who are the tax collectors of our time –
who carries the mantle of greed and exploitation in the name of legitimate
business these days: well there are many examples are there not but just to put
out one or two. Loan sharks spring to
mind especially at this Christmas time creating a hopeless cycle of borrowing,
high interest, larger loans to those who can least afford it. What about shops offering easy credit hand in
hand with ‘you know you want it’ advertising, putting pressure on people to
equate happiness and love with big price tags – the bigger the better in fact. What of enormous profits, obscene salaries in
the same society that needs to form a protest movement to try to get some
earners a wage they can live on?
What of national and big business, any sort
of business really, whose wealth is built on exploitation of people and land –
isn’t that what the fair trade movement is trying to do – encouraging us to
recognise the corruption and remove ourselves from supporting it?
This is what John the Baptist is saying to
us: where the system is corrupt – get out.
And what of the increasing militarisation
of our world, our so-called war on terror and the scaremongering that justifies
torture, assassinations, where young, old and innocent lives are the accepted
price of ‘greater good’! What of the ones who follow orders knowing that what
they are being asked to do is wrong, abusive, inhumane? John says – you are bigger and better than
this, do not blindly do what is asked of you – stop, do not torture, do not
abuse, you are worth more than that. Walk away from it. And we can take this scenario outside of the
military, the battlefield and think of all the places where we have power in
the world and abuse it. It can be in the
family circle, at work, socially, in our sport and our media, and you don’t
have to go far over the last couple of days to find examples, especially in the
online news stories, of people who have abused their power just because they
can or in the interests of a ‘breaking’ news story.
So John is asking us to clean up our act,
to recognise and step away from that which we know is not right in order that
we might be better prepared for the coming of Jesus. It’s a hard message in the midst of the
Advent season – but it is needs to be heard again and again as we prepare for
the arrival of the Christ child.
Because in this moment, in this act of
birth, God is saying to us that the kingdom will come, but not in worldly power
or in mighty acts, not in violent control nor self-promotion –but rather in
vulnerability and in love. The kingdom
will be found in the act of the widow who put her coin in the box, in the child
who sits at your knee, in the outcast welcomed home and the unclean made
well. This is the new up-side-down way
that calls us away from a world of power and influence and into a place of love
and grace. This is the new relationship
with God made known in Christ Jesus who says ‘welcome me in the stable, be with
me on the cross, meet me in the resurrection, be filled with my grace, choose
my way, reject the way that you know is wrong and change the world, let my
kingdom come. In our acts of love and
justice and compassion may we, filled with God’s grace, choose live the way of
truth, to acknowledge the pain of this world, know that this is not the way it
needs to be and that we can make a difference in the light and love of Christ. Thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment