at first i had no idea what i was going to preach on, because all the lectionary passages this morning seemed so freaking short, and the gospel bit is first just a list of names and then a quote from Isaiah. and i couldn't extend the selection (it's only part of the pericope) because next week takes up the text right where this week's leaves off.
and then in one of those weird things that happens when you're writing a sermon, i realized exactly how much Luke was cramming into these short verses and i ended up with this incredibly dense sermon. it really wants to be about double this length with some lighter bits to break it up. but they like their sermons short and sweet at the 8am service.
Advent Light
Happy Hanukkah!
Today is the second Sunday of Advent, but it is also the first day of Hanukkah. We lit the first candles last night. Like Christmas, Hanukkah is a winter holiday celebrated with light. It commemorates the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple after Antiochus Epiphanes put up statues of Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes and sacrificed a pig on the altar in order to force the Jews to stop worshipping their God.
It may not be surprising, then, that the books that record this story, the books of Maccabees which are found in the Apocrypha of our Bibles, are books that look forward intensely to the coming of God into the world. This is a viewpoint we often call “apocalyptic.” The books of Maccabees also record some of the clearest references to the hope of resurrection and the life of the world to come in any of the literature we have. We even know that Jesus observed Hanukkah, because John’s gospel tells us in chapter 10, “At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.” It’s not surprising that Jesus would be associated in the gospel with a holiday about God’s intervention in the world and resurrection, is it?
Hanukkah is very like Advent, that way. They are both times of looking both forward and backwards. Hanukkah looks backwards to the miracle of the restoration of the Temple, and forwards to God’s ultimate restoration of the world, resurrection. In Advent, we look back to Jesus’ birth, his first coming, and forward… To God’s ultimate restoration of the world, resurrection.
It is the desire for this restoration, this ultimate point of God’s contact with the world, that seems to be motivating John the Baptist in Luke’s gospel today. Luke begins by listing all the human rulers of the world, beginning with Tiberias, the emperor in far-off Rome, and going through governors and “tetrarchs,” which is the word simply translated as “ruler” here, all the way down to the high priest in Jerusalem. Luke’s inclusion of the high priest in this list of other rulers tells us that they ought to be lumped in the same category with them, oppressors and corrupt. The corruption of the world extends all the way to Jerusalem, to God’s own Temple.
And then…. What? ”the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” The word of God doesn’t come to Rome. It doesn’t come to the Jewish rulers in Galilee, Ituraea, or Abilene. It doesn’t come to the high priest in Jerusalem. It comes to a man in the wilderness. This is a further indictment of the power structures and hierarchies of this world, both secular and religious. Although, that’s not a division ancient people would have recognized. One of the titles the emperor in Rome held was “pontifex maximus,” high priest. And the high priests in Jerusalem were as much political powers and leaders as they were religious leaders. God passes over both pagan and Jewish powers by human structures, and he sends his word to a man in the wilderness.
This is a powerful statement about how God works. God doesn’t care about human power, about the people humans think are important. Keep in mind that the situation here is the Pax Romana. Augustus, Tiberius’ step-father had welded together an empire that stretched from Spain and Morocco, encompassing all the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, on past Turkey, Syria, and Palestine all the way to what today we call Iraq. And not only had he merged this huge amount of land and disparate peoples, each with their own religion, language, and culture, but he had, in the end, established peace. The wars that had convulsed the Mediterranean world were over. Roads stretched from Barcelona to Rome, from Alexandria to Jerusalem and on north to Byzantium. Jerusalem sat at a crossroads of the ancient east-west road from Baghdad and the north-south road from Alexandria. In this peace, made possible by the Roman emperor and the Roman armies, wealth was being created and cultural exchange was happening on a scale that not even Alexander the Great, 300 years earlier, had ever accomplished.
And God said, you know what? I don’t care. It’s all wrong. The Roman peace came at the cost of thousands of lives, oppression, taxation, and religious compromise. The Jewish people had rioted against Pontius Pilate when he came to Jerusalem because he put Roman eagles inside the Jewish Temple there. We know from Josephus, himself a Jerusalem aristocrat, that the Jewish high priesthood at the time were more politicians than priests, more concerned with power and Roman politics than serving God.
Do we know anything about corruption today? Do we know about peace, wealth, and good living bought at the cost of lives? Do you know how hard it is these days to find a product not built, assembled, or manufactured in a factory in China somewhere? Or many of the other countries with minimal labour and environmental protection laws? Do we know about trying to change these things through human power?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized the incompatibility of God’s coming into the world with human power structures. As someone who took the step of defying the human authorities of the Nazi government and the official church they had authorized, he knew the risks. He was eventually executed for taking part in a failed plan to assassinate Hitler himself.
Bonhoeffer believed with all his life that sometimes human power is so corrupt, God will stand against it. In one of his Advent sermons, he said this:
“We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God's coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God's coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.
"Only when we have felt the terror of the matter, can we recognize the incomparable kindness. God comes into the very midst of evil and of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love. God makes us happy as only children can be happy.”
God lays claim to the world, he says, and that should frighten us! It is this same sense that causes John to begin proclaiming “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” God is coming! John says. We ought to feel terror because the evil in us is going to be judged. In this way, John fills the role of the prophet of God, the “voice crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’”
That, of course, is the famous quote from the prophet Isaiah. What is a prophet? Is it just someone who tells the future? Isaiah is a prophet because he “predicted” there would be a voice calling in the wilderness and now John the Baptist is doing it?
Well… partly. The prophets in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, do often predict things in the future. But their primary function is to remind people of their relationship with their God, and to call them out of living in the world’s corruption to living the way God has told them to live. This is why John the Baptist fits the prophet profile, not because he is predicting something, but because he is preaching “a baptism of repentance.” This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “the serious aspect” of Advent. God is coming to judge the corruption and evil of the world, not just “out there” in Rome and Galilee and Abilene, but also right here, in Jerusalem, in his holy Temple itself. The corruption and evil in us.
And then the terror turns around into hope, peace, joy, and love. God comes to us as a child, a crying, helpless infant who will grow up to judge the evil of the world and its powers, the evil that all humanity is capable of, by suffering that evil himself. From prison awaiting his execution, Bonhoeffer himself wrote, “only the suffering God can help.”
The suffering God who came to us as one of us, who was born a human infant and died a man at the hands of humans themselves teaches us a different way. Not a way of power, of armies, of roads and wealth, but a way of repentance, love, peace. In this dark season of the year, the Advent candles remind us of many things, but especially they remind me of when Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” And he knows how hard life in this world can be because he did it! He lived it. He died. In this Advent season, as we look forward to the coming of Jesus the baby, may we not forget the light that we are, the light of his death and resurrection, the light of hope, peace, joy, and love, the light of reconciling and restoring the world the way he taught us.
Amen.
