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Church of Our
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191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
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Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
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This page revised 10
Dec 00
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oursaviour
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Prepare,
Discern, Change
Reflections on the
lessons for the Second Sunday of Advent
10 December 2000
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Baruch 5:1-9 / Psalm 126
Philippians 1:1-11 / Luke
3:1-6
When I wasn't reading the newspapers this week, I was reading something just about as exciting -- today's lessons and a great study based on them by a fellow named Grant Gallup. He's the son of the Gallup Poll taker and a very talented preacher now living in (of all places) Nicaragua. His intellect and his passion for the environment make him a pretty brilliant commentator on John the Baptist and the prophet's Advent message: "Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight".
John the Baptist is one of the real stars of the Bible. If it were a play, he'd have one of the great lines of all history. "Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight." And Luke, as a playwright, would win awards for precisely setting the scene for John's entrance into the biblical drama. Luke says that the act opens when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea. Tiberius had been emperor of Rome for fifteen years. And Herod was the local party boss in Galilee. Caiaphas was High Priest at the Temple in Jerusalem. But his father-in-law, Annas, still had his hand in things. That's a pretty precise moment in time. Luke tells us that it was about 27 or 28 AD -- perhaps the month of August or September. And time had come to prepare. The time for preparation, he's saying, is specific. Not just any old time will do. At that time, the time had come.
Luke couldn't have known as much about the larger world as we do today. But this specific time to prepare came as the Han dynasty was beginning in China. Cymbelline was being recognized as King of the Britons; London was just being settled. Soap was the big technological invention of the day in France. The Pantheon was being built to house the many homeless gods in Rome, the ones whose own temples were no longer viable and therefore closed. In other developments at Rome, the oboe had just been invented there. The Japanese had recently started training professional Sumo wrestlers. Jesus was still living at home with his mom. He was preparing to come after John with a fuller message to prepare because the old world was coming to an end and a new day was about to dawn globally and there would be trouble and turmoil during the transition.
The word PREPARE is made up of two words, pre (meaning beforehand), and pare (meaning to cut), as in paring vegetables or trimming fat off meat. To prepare is to take action beforehand, in planning and plotting the future. Look at all the seeds of the future that were sprouting at the time of John the Baptist. Radically new governments in China and Britain. Health and hygiene advances were transforming the way people lived in France. Music, sports, and religion were being overhauled in Rome and Japan. Everything we're living with now -- modern living -- were there to prepare for back in year 27.
And what we're doing today in our nations, states, cities, towns, and homes -- whether we like it or not -- is preparation for what's coming on down the line. The Bible is crystal clear: Preparation, like stewardship, is all the time and the time is now. The institutions and civilizations that neglected to prepare in 27 are no longer with us. And those that did prepare -- and are still making up the world as we know it -- had better not forget to prepare now or they -- we -- will wind up in the dustbin of history.
Look around. It seems to me that we'll soon have either a president who doesn't think the global ecological crisis is for real. Or else one stiffly incapable of communicating its urgency to the great majority of people. President Reagan in the years of the "Star Wars" defense plan spoke of the potential "threat to our world from some other species from another planet." But that's a pretty dead area for preparation these days. The world we live in is the one in which we find the really threatening species, and the threatened. As a million preachers before me have done, I'll quote the old Pogo comic strip. "We have seen the enemy and he is us."
Most all of the time you get what you prepare for. And politically, economically, and environmentally people all over the earth seem to be preparing for some real trouble. But John the Baptist's warning is still before us. "Stop it now. Do something. Change course. Prepare the way of the Lord." Fill up the valleys of poverty. Flatten the mountains of greed that don't think our air, water, and forests are too high a price to pay for a few generations of high life. It's a metaphor, I know. But John's message is that God will show up one day and look us in the eye and demand an explanation for why we thought driving enormous SUVs and blithely ignoring the destructive way our energy resources are used were good reasons to make the planet unlivable for William, who is being baptized today, or his children, or their children.
You all should ask me the same question. But right this minute it's my job to ask you. Whose way are you preparing in your own life and times, your own commitments, your own habits? Or are you preparing the way of the Lord? Are you preparing -- however inadvertently -- for the pillage of creation and an end to the harmony between humanity and nature that God wants for us?
Paul writes to us today a lot of words -- they are the usual "religious" words we hear from Paul. We hear them so often that we don't really listen to them anymore. Grace, Peace, Joy, Love. But toward the end, Paul sends a knockout wish to the church at Philippi. He says he wants their love to "overflow with knowledge and insight". INSIGHT. There's something that would prepare the way of the Lord if you ask me: Love that is focused and savvy. An informed love that's not all talk and no action.
The Greek word that comes into English as "insight" is aesthesis. It's the root for another English word "aesthetic". We associate that word with "taste". Aesthetics is the discipline concerned with recognizing the good, the true, the beautiful. What is it that makes some people able to see that Picasso was a great artist? To understand that Jerry Falwell is a bigot who twists scripture into lies? To hear that Bach was a genius? It's discernment, insight, aesthesis.
Insight is a gift of God which helps us to appreciate the gifts of God, and it helps us to see not only into such things as beauty, but to hear and taste and smell goodness and truth as well. Insight linked to knowledge and channeled through love is our greatest tool for knowing how to do the right thing. The theologian J. A. T. Robinson said that God equips righteous people with a set of invisible antennae that pick up the movements of God's Spirit in a matter. That's insight.
John says get ready for what's coming. Paul says wake up to what's going on all around you. And Baruch chimes in with "now do something about it". Change. Actually, all the readings are big on change. John calls it "repent". Paul calls it several things: improve, increase, deepen. Baruch wrote for a people about to return to the Promised Land from exile, from years of being away.
We have been "away" for a long time. In the rich and industrialized countries we have unhitched ourselves from our connection with the environment. Pulled up our roots from the land. It's the price we thought we were paying for living the way we do. But we have been deceived. It was just a deposit on a mammoth, cataclysmic balloon payment about to come due.
Today's lessons say we need to change. And change now. We need to change clothes, to begin with. Baruch calls us to "Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction." We may not even admit to ourselves that we're wearing any such thing. But it seems to God that we are. And whom are we going to trust? Using up the beauty of creation as if there were no tomorrow is the opposite of preparing the way of the Lord. It's time to get a new look, a new life. Time to put on some beautiful new clothes, a cloak of fairness and solidarity with the rest of the world and with the world to come. And to start wearing a new hat, one that comes with taking a responsible role in honoring God by respecting the integrity of creation.
Baruch maintains that God means to show the splendor of the communion of saints everywhere under heaven. But it isn't splendor that America and the rest of the industrial world are showing right now. We're showing willful blindness, greed, and flagrant self-indulgence at the expense not only of the rest of the world but of all those who potentially come after us to enjoy the fruits of the earth and the glories of creation in generations to come.
It's time to prepare. Time to come back from our tragic exile from the earth. It's time to use our insight. Time to open our eyes and look at in the direction God is sending us. And time to change our actions into those of an intentional People of God who will expect to face God's judgment. One day our wanton squandering will hit the wall. The signs are around us already. Things will change. It will happen fast. And our carefree exploitation of the great riches we hold in trust from God will fly away like a dream.
Our only hope lies in preparing, discerning, and changing so that when the day of judgment is upon us we will be measured not by how extravagantly and thoughtlessly we have lived, but by how scrupulously we have cared for people and for things that cannot protect themselves.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome mailto:MLewis@secaucus.org
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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