Luke 3:1-6  “God’s Advance Team”

Introduction

            You never know what how the boy or girl next door is going to turn out.  The boy who lived next door to us while I was growing up turned out to have a very interesting career.  After he grew up Dale started out as a golf pro, but ended up as a member of the first President Bush’s advance team.  Dale dressed in preppy and later business attire.  The whole sixties thing seemed to have passed him by.  When I’d see Dale occasionally he’d talk about the exciting places he’d visited as he went before the president, working with others on the team to assure everything was organized and secure for an upcoming visit of President Bush I. 

            But when I’d listen to Dale, I sensed none of the excitement such an awesome job would entail.  Dale had one of those quiet, steady voices with little inflection that could carry a person into the snooze zone in about five minutes.  I always marveled at his ability to make the most incredible adventures sound commonplace and mundane.

            Today in Luke’s gospel we read about God’s advance team.  Actually, it was only one person, John the Baptist.  John was anything but boring. If John were alive today, people seeing him would probably shake their heads and mutter, “Typical PK, that is Preacher’s Kid.  Preachers’ kids are notorious for rebelling against the strictures of their parents and the pressures of the religious community to measure up to high standards, some PKs adopt experimental lifestyles.  John certainly had an eccentric edge.  He left his parents’ home and lived in the wilderness, dressing in rustic garb and eating South Wilderness Diet, which predated the South Beach diet by about 2000 years. Since it consisted of only locusts and wild honey, the diet never realized much popularity. Though the renderings of what artists imagine John looked like picture him robust and burly, I envision John as rather scrawny and sinewy since one would need to eat a whole lot of locusts and honey to bulk up. 

            Some scholars speculate that John had some association with the Essenes, a group of Jewish ascetics, who established a community in wilderness.  Wherever John developed his theology, he was passionate about his role in God’s great unfolding drama.  He came to herald the Good News that the long-anticipated Messiah was coming. 

            Advent and Christmas scripture passages are very familiar, at least to those of us who have grown up in the church, and often the startling impact of this story is lost for us.  So I thought I’d help us to perhaps hear the story anew through a different rendering of today’s passage.  It’s from Clarence Jordan’s Cottonpatch paraphrase.

During the fifteenth year of Tiberius as President, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Georgia, and Herod was governor of Alabama, his brother Philip being governor of Mississippi, and Lysanias still holding out over Arkansas; while Annas and Caiaphas were co-presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention, the word of God came to Zack’s boy, John, down on the farm. And he went all around in the rural areas preaching a dipping in water–a symbol of a changed way of life as the basis for getting things straightened out. This was based on a passage from the book of Isaiah the prophet:

A voice shouts: Make a road for the Lord in the depressed areas, and make it straight.  Every low place shall be filled in,
And every hill and high place shall be pushed down.
And the curves shall be straightened out.

And the washboard road scraped smooth.
Then every human being will share in the good things of God.

If John the Baptist were to appear to us today, we might hear these words:

In the sixth year of the presidency of George W. Bush, while Condoleezza Rice was Secretary of State, while Arnold Schwarzeneggar was governor of California, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II in England, the Word of God came to an earthworm farmer named Billy Bob in the backwoods of Louisiana.”

The people of Luke’s day were surprised at the announcement that in a world filled with so many powerful people, God’s Word came to a relatively unknown, powerless person like John the Baptist from up in the Judean hills, let alone from a guy who had opted for a strange desert lifestyle. One would think he would have had more impact in the big cities, especially the capital.  If he really wanted to lobby for his cause, he should have chosen the halls of power.  Would that be the kind of person we would choose to speak to us about God? But that is who God chose.
            We live in a world that values the successful life that leads to the top. The goal of life is to get ahead.  Of course, those words are never heard.  People wanting to excel use words like,  “this job is just not challenging enough.” or “my skills are underutilized in this work.  We convince ourselves that the goal of life is to aspire to  positions of power. However,  John the Baptist challenged those assumptions. Rather than encourage further climbing of the social and economic ladder, John proclaimed a message of repentance. The Greek word for “repentance” is metanoia.  Metanoia means “to change your mind” or more accurately, “to change your way of thinking.

We celebrate Advent every year not just to prepare for Christmas, remembering the marvelous story of the incarnation of God as Jesus.  Advent reminds us that Jesus is coming again, and we still need to think about being ready.  I’m not talking about the fearful images of The Left Behind series.  Metanoia means readying ourselves for the presence of God in our lives.  It involves not only admitting the wrongs we have committed, but also taking positive actions to correct those past misdeeds.

            Police in Enid, Oklahoma, were called to a woman’s house to investigate a break-in. But the intruder did not enter the house to steal things; rather he came to return articles that he had previously stolen. In particular, the thief repented by returning the woman’s television, stereo, and VCR. Police officers reported that “the apparent crook-with-a-conscience even reconnected the wires and repaired the door jamb damaged in the original break-in.[1]

            Unfortunately, it’s not easy to repent.  We can’t just put things back the way they were.  Indeed, some things we do are not reparable.  For example, it’s impossible to undo a murder. On a simpler scale, we’d like to take back the harsh words we’ve spoken to our children or our coworkers, but repentance on our part doesn’t necessarily correlate with forgiveness on theirs.

                        Today’s Gospel reading encourages us to repent, to make the changes that need to be made. Although it has been adapted and modified by many people and groups over the years, the so-called Serenity Prayer was originally authored by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1943, at the height of America’s conflict with Germany. The prayer, as Niebuhr wrote it, states: “God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Since Niebuhr never copyrighted the prayer, it has undergone a number of modifications over the years.

                        In particular, Alcoholics Anonymous changed the part that says “courage to change the things that should be changed” to “courage to change what can be changed.” Niebuhr’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, laments the way that change significantly weakens the content of the prayer. As changed by AA, the prayer “speaks merely of what we think we might manage to alter at a given moment, to change what we can change. But there are circumstances that should be changed yet may seem beyond our powers to alter, and these are the circumstances under which the prayer is most needed.”[2]

 John the Baptist invites us to change not only what can be changed, but to change what should be changed.  God’s Advance Team, John the Baptizer, comes among us to call us to get ready, to turn away from those activities that separate us from God and turn toward those ways of being in the world, those acts of kindness that reflect our allegiance to Christ, to Immanuel to God coming among us. Amen.