Advent 2 – 8 Dec 2024
Readings: Malachi 3: 1-14, Song of Zechariah, Philippians 1: 1-11, Luke 3: 1-6
We’re introduced this morning on the Second Sunday of Advent to the figure of John the Baptist, and we encounter him again next Sunday. Luke in his account is very keen to link John the Baptist into a historical context, so he lays it on very intentionally. If we perhaps rephrase the first few verses of the Gospel as “In the third year of the reign of King Charles the Third, when Dr. Jeanette Young was Governor of Queensland and David Crisafulli Premier of Queensland and Adrian Schrinner Lord Mayor of Brisbane and during the Archbishopric of Jeremy Greaves, then the word of God came….” You get the gist of what Luke is emphasizing, and I’ve chosen those names deliberately because Luke addresses his gospel principally to urban dwellers, more cosmopolitan people if you like. If Mark’s Gospel is addressed to the disenfranchised, dwellers in small villages and towns, to those who are disadvantaged, Luke’s Gospel is addressed to a different stratum of society. The good news of Jesus is good news for them, too. Although we should note the word of God didn’t come to them first – it came to John. AS John Bell writes in one of his hymns: “Not the powerful, not the privileged, not the famous in the land, but the no-ones and the needy were the first to hold God’s hand.”[1]
John the Baptist appears in history, and at a key moment in Israel’s history when they were again suffering under the yoke of a military occupation, this time by the Romans. Devout people longed for the time when Israel would be led out of slavery yet again to a glorious new freedom. The old prophets had spoken of this, so when a fiery young prophet, the son of Elizabeth and Zechariah, appeared in the wilderness of Judea, people were ready to listen to his message of repentance. We’ll hear next Sunday just how fiery he could be. For John, as for the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, the way to escape servitude was to return to God with heart and soul. This morning, we hear God speaking through Malachi “Return to me and I will return to you”.[2] Or when people heard of one who was preparing the way for the Lord, those who knew their Hebrew scriptures would recall Isaiah writing of one calling in the wilderness “Prepare the way of the Lord”. Malachi says essentially the same thing[3] in the passage this morning about a messenger who would prepare the way.
So when Luke quotes from Isaiah Chapter 40[4] as he does in the Gospel passage this morning, not only does he anchor John the Baptist in his contemporary society and spiritual tradition, but he broadens the great sweep of history by about 700 years by taking his readers back to the time of Isaiah – that God was present and active then as now, that people weren’t all that much different then than they were now. And behind the imagery of the highway God would use to come to his people was an even more ancient tradition – the Babylonians would prepare special roads for festive processions of their Gods. Sure, times were different, but people still turned away from God, and that the same call to return to God was as clear then as it was now, people still longed to celebrate freedom and restoration.
And the voice that cried out was, the voice of one. Not a crowd, not the thousands we have seen for example, in TV reports from Georgia in recent protests, but one voice, in the wilderness, calling for change. How can one voice make a change?
History is full of examples. Mahatma Gandhi’s lone voice initially ranged against the might of empire in India, and that lone voice had sowed the seeds of a movement that would bring independence and the world’s largest parliamentary democracy. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s story of one voice in the wilderness of apartheid violence comes to mind. It was a voice people heard and heeded. His certainly was the lone voice which called for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which tried to bring healing. Some years ago, Libbie and I made a visit to St. Nicholas’ Church in Leipzig. There’s an astounding story there of how one or two voices in the wilderness of oppression and suspicion began regular Monday prayers for peace – and these led to the downfall of the East German Communist regime and the Berlin Wall.
You may be able to think of other lone voices who have cried out in the wilderness – whose voices have prepared the way for transformation and change. There are often stories in the media of “whistleblowers” – lone voices, who it must be said with courage and at great cost shine the light on unethical behaviours or abusive practices and bring about change. John’s “voice in the wilderness” cost him his life. Lone voices do make a difference. Sometimes we can seem to be a lone voice – don’t let that stop you. Sometimes I think communities of faith like ours are voices in the wilderness - we seem to be alone and a shrinking voice too. But when you stop and listen there are those all around us who “prepare the way” for God and God’s purposes by following and speaking of God’s beauty, truth, peace, and love—and by encouraging others to do the same. These, too, are “messengers of the covenant in whom [we] delight.” All of us have the ability and potential to speak words of beauty, truth and love and so prepare the way of the Lord in our own surrounds wherever they may be.
The voice of the one calling in Isaiah 40 is unnamed and really a poetic device communicating the prophecy. The voice tells Isaiah’s audience that God would liberate Israel from exile in Babylon, directing the construction of a “highway,” as it were, in the wilderness. A highway in the wilderness is a recurring motif throughout Isaiah’s prophecies of deliverance. Like many biblical prophecies, the voice of one calling in the wilderness has a dual fulfillment. More immediately, it predicted delivery from Babylonian exile. Later, Isaiah’s anonymous “voice of one calling in the wilderness” is fulfilled by another prophet. More than 700 years after Isaiah’s prophetic vision, the voice of one calling in the wilderness shows up again—this time in literal fashion. All four gospel writers cite Isaiah 40, connecting John’s voice and his ministry of preparing people for the coming of the Lord with the voice spoken of by the prophet Isaiah. What if the voice of one crying out in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord is the voice of God speaking through the anonymous voice. After all, we’ll soon sing “The voice of God goes out to all the world”[5] Can we re-imagine the line from Isaiah that Luke quotes and think of the lone voice of God calling to us in the wilderness of our world as we live between hope and despair, peace and war, wealth and poverty, plenty and famine, beauty of creation and environmental destruction, health and sickness, life and death. People can live in their own wilderness – for some it’s the wilderness of loss and grief, for others it’s mental illness, or exclusion, or discrimination. Yet in all the spaces and places of wilderness there is a lone voice crying out – the voice of God, enticing, pleading, encouraging saying “Prepare the way for me”, “Return to me and I will return to you,” “Straighten things up in your life, smooth off some rough edges.” God longs for us to return, to enfold us in his love, to equip us and send us out so we can prepare the way for him in other places.
Advent, for all its fullness of joy and expectation is also a penetential season when we work to clear the road between ourselves and God. Road work these days is still hard work. The Christmas message of hope and peace isn’t an easy ride. To prepare the way for God’s voice to be heard and for God’s presence in the world to be recognized demands transformation of our own values – our own valleys need to be filled, our own obstacles need to be lowered, our own crooked ways need to be made straight, our own rough ways need to be made smooth. Hard work – the work of repentance - needs to be done to let the Christ child be born in our lives. But if we do, the road is much smoother and we will find that the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.[6]
[1] Together in Song 288
[2] Malachi 3:7
[3] Malachi 3:1
[4] Isaiah 40: 3-5
[5] Together In Song No 282
[6] Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:78)
© The Reverend Bill Crossman