Readings: Is 40:1-11; Ps 85:7-13; Acts 13:14b-26; Lk
1:57-80
How
would you prepare?
In the days of King Herod,
right around the beginning of what we call the Common Era, there was a priest named
Zechariah, who was married to a woman named Elizabeth. They were good people, but they were sad and
were even scorned by those around them because they hadn’t been able to have
children, and now it was too late because they were getting old. One day when it was Zechariah’s turn to be on
duty in the sanctuary of the temple an angel appeared to him, and he was
terrified. But the angel said, “Don’t be
afraid. You and Elizabeth will have a
son, and you will name him John. God is
coming, and your son John will be sent to prepare the way of the Lord, to get
people ready for God’s coming.”
And Zechariah said, “Yeah
right.” And he lost his voice for the
next nine months.
Now, despite Zechariah’s
skepticism, it turns out the angel was indeed right. A few days later, Elizabeth conceived a
child. And nine months later she gave birth
to a baby boy. And the whole family and
all the neighbours celebrated with Zechariah and Elizabeth, that is, until
eight days later when it was time to name the boy. You see, pretty much everyone was agreed that
since this was likely to be old Zechariah’s only son, they should follow
tradition and name the boy Zechariah after his father. But Elizabeth, for some strange reason,
wanted to name the boy John.
“But nobody in your family
has that name,” replied all the relatives in exasperation at Elizabeth’s
stubbornness.
They turned to Zechariah to
settle the matter. And Zechariah,
remembering the words the angel had spoken to him, wrote on a tablet, “His name
will be John”. And suddenly his voice
returned and he began praising God. And now
everyone was afraid, and rumours started spreading throughout the village and
the surrounding hill country, and everyone started asking “What is so special
about this boy? What will this child
become?”
And Zechariah, filled with
the Holy Spirit began to prophesy:
“And you, child, you, John,
will be called the prophet of the Most High
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his
ways,
to give knowledge of
salvation unto his people by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our
God,
the dawn from on high will
break upon us.
To give light to those who
sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into
the way of peace.”
And the child John grew and
became strong in the spirit.
And I can imagine that when
he was a bit older, John went to his mother and father to ask them a question.
“Hey mom, dad. Why is it that everyone else seems to be
named after someone in their family, but my name is John even though nobody
else in our family is named John?”
And perhaps his parents
responded,
“John, I guess it’s about
time you knew. You were given to us by
the Lord and it is God who named you John.
God is coming, just like the prophets said he would. And you have been chosen to prepare the way
of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s arrival.”
Now I want you to imagine
yourselves in the sandals of young John at that very moment. Suppose someone was to walk up to you and
tell you that God is coming, soon, really soon, and that your purpose in life,
the very reason for which you were born is to prepare the way of the Lord, to
get people ready for God’s arrival.
What would you do? How would you prepare? What would you say to people? If you had to choose something, what would be
the single most important thing that you would focus on?
These aren’t rhetorical
questions. You should find pencils in
the pews in front of you, and you can use the empty pages in the booklet to
write down your thoughts. How would you
prepare the way of the Lord? Take a few
minutes to write down some thoughts, and then you can turn and compare notes
with the people sitting around you. What
would your first priority be when it comes to getting people ready for God’s
arrival?
If we accomplished nothing
else with this exercise, I’m sure we all have a lot more sympathy for John than
we did a few minutes ago. When John was
told that God was coming and that he’d been chosen to prepare the way and get
people ready, I wouldn’t have been surprised if his reaction had been “you’ve
got to be kidding”.
It’s not like John had a lot
more information than we do. He didn’t
know what God’s coming would look like.
He didn’t know that God was coming in the particular person of Jesus of
Nazareth. He just knew that his job was
to get people ready.
So how did he go about
that? How would you go about that? How would we get people ready for God to
come? Any ideas that came out of your
reflections?
We might have all sorts of
ideas. We might encourage people to go
to church (in John’s day the temple and synagogue). We might teach people about what God is like. We might exhort people to live lives of
justice, to live ethically. We might
encourage people to spend more time in prayer, to get to know God.
I imagine that John thought
about all these things and more.
But it seems that, perhaps
inspired by the power of the Spirit, John the Baptist made one thing his
priority. And that one thing was
forgiveness.
When it came time for John
to prepare the way of the Lord, he went into the region around the Jordan River
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
John’s priority was
forgiveness. His way to get people ready
for God was to teach them about, and help them experience, and give them a
ritual, for forgiveness.
Now most of us know from our
own experience that forgiveness is hard.
Forgiveness is complicated. But
forgiveness is essential if we are to have good relationships with God and with
each other.
John isn’t the only one who
makes forgiveness a priority. Jesus
also makes forgiveness a priority. In
fact, it was one of the first things that got Jesus in trouble with the
authorities. And in the prayer that he
taught us, the one that we say together every Sunday, Jesus tells us that in
order for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven, we need to forgive
others in the same way that God forgives us.
That sounds like a challenge.
Forgiving others isn’t easy. Accepting and really understanding that God
has forgiven us isn’t easy. Even forgiving
ourselves isn’t easy, in fact that might be the hardest one of all. It seems that we have a natural inclination
for “tit for tat”. It seems that the
idea that people should get what they deserve is deeply engrained in our psyche
and in our societies. It seems that we
like to hold grudges in our back pockets, just in case we ever need to take
them out and use them.
But John invites us into something
new.
I think that the reason that
John makes forgiveness a priority is that he’s inviting us into a new way of
living, in order to get us ready for the coming of God into our lives.
A way of living, a way of
being, a way of relating, that Jesus calls the kingdom of God.
It’s a way that requires
repentance. It requires us to change our way of doing things, in fact, it requires
that we change ourselves. It requires that
we turn toward God and towards each other, and let go of those things that
burden our relationships, things like guilt and resentment and keeping score
and anger and fear and so on. And not just
to let go of them, but to lift them off each other. The Hebrew word for forgiveness that John would
have used has exactly this sense. To lift up. To remove someone’s burden.
Know that you are forgiven,
and learn to forgive others, so that we can all experience a new way of
living. That’s how we prepare the way of
the Lord.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment