“Setting the Stage” (Luke 3:1-6)

Biblical lineages are puzzling to many of us in our fast-paced, individualistic society.  The American zeitgeist, the American dream, is based on the notion of progress.  Moving forward.  Moving ahead.  And I don’t know about you, but my eyes tend to glaze over when I come up against one of those Old Testament laundry lists.   “These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood.  And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.  And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.  And Salah lived . . .”  (snore) . . . oh, excuse me . . . I fell asleep.

Where was I?  Oh yes: in our forward-looking, progressivist society, a lot of us don’t worry much about who begat who much further back than our grandparents and great-grandparents, but they did back in ancient times.  It was important for our Hebrew forebears to know where a person came from . . . lines of inheritance were critical—one had to authenticate the line of inheritance of an hereditary stake-hold  . . . sometime it was a matter of life and death.

It was at least as important for theological reasons, for placing a person in the line of God’s people, for establishing them in the historical framework of God’s interaction with humankind.  Classic examples are the genealogies that establish the lineage of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.  It was vital for him to be seen as the heir to the throne of David to substantiate the early Christians claims that he was the Messiah foretold in the Hebrew scriptures.  The interesting thing about these geneologies is that they are different, both in length and who is mentioned, and they reflect the differing theological stances and agendas of their authors.

If genealogies set the historical stage, the verses with which Luke begins today’s passage set the immediate, contextual stage.  “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.”  And this formal listing of who is what helps establish John as a prophetic voice: several Old Testament prophetic accounts—notably Jeremiah and Micah—begin with such a name-dropping of the ruling who’s who.  It also follows a pattern that Luke has used twice before: once to introduce John’s father, Zechariah himself, and once to introduce the birth of Jesus, which he begins by mentioning Emperor Augustus and Quirinius, governor of Syria.  Finally, it introduces both Herod, Pilate, and Caiaphus, who will be important players in the drama about to unfold.

But wait, there’s more!  It starts big and gets small.  It begins with the big Kahuna himself, the Emperor Tiberius, then follows up governors of the regions around where Jesus was born, then the head religious authorities, and finally, least of all, John, son of Zechariah.  And far from being some kind of convenient way to order things, perhaps some ancient version of alphabetization, the order of big to small is part of the point:  it was the days of big guns—the Tiberius’, the Pilates, and the Herods—and the word of God comes not to them, not to the glitterati of the Rome and Jerusalem set, but to a half-crazed, goat-skin-wrapped honey-muncher named John.  And what’s more, the word of God came not to the palaces or the temples, not to the homes of the rich and famous, no matter how much Robin Lynch might wish it, but to the dry, barren, fly-speckled wilderness of a backwards province in the great Roman machine.  Talk about your reversal of fortune, talk about your least of these.  Embedded in the very structure of how he presents the powers, Luke makes one of the fundamental points of the Gospel:  the last is literally the first to receive the word of God.

John is the embodiment of that point, what Paul refers to as “the foolishness of the cross” . . . remember?   “. . . God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”  Luke is implying the same thing:  God chose a smelly, itinerant preacher to shame the Herods.  God chose the barren wastelands, the wasted, blasted heath, to shame the dazzling centers of power, the Washingtons, the Paris’ and the Romes.  What is weak to the powers that be—the wandering preachers, the shepherds watching their flocks, the poor in the tenements of Cincinnati—are strong to the almighty God; what is weak to that God—the standing armies, the palace guards, the nuclear aircraft carriers and missile-defense systems—are strength to the powers that be.

And Luke says the word of God came to John in the wilderness, but it is not the capital-W word of God . . . the Greek phrase he uses is not logos tou theou, which he uses later in Acts for the Gospel embodied in Jesus Christ.  Instead, he uses rema theou, which might be better translated as “some words of God” or “a word of God.”  John is not the Word of God, nor has the Word come to him . . . yet.  His is a message from God, informing us of something . . . it’s a prophetic word, for that’s what John is: the last of the prophets.  He is not the one who will follow him, he is not the one whose sandals he is not fit to tie.  He is the mouthpiece of God, and the words of God, the rema of the creator, are put there just as they were burned onto Isaiah’s lips by the flying-snakes of the temple, just as they were when Ezekiel ate the parchment of God in his Babylonian exile.  Those words are put there and can be taken away at the whim of God.

And John preached this word in all the regions around the Jordan, in those very regions named by Luke:  In Herod’s Galilee and his brother Phillip’s Iturea and Trachonitis; in Pilate’s Judea and Lysanias’ Abilene, my Abilene.  In all the regions ruled by the rich and powerful, under the royal thumb of Tiberius, Emperor of all that was, John the baptizer preached his message from God.

And what was that message?  It was a message of repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sins.  Repentance—in Greek, metanoia—a turning around, a turning away from one’s old path, onto a new road, a new way of being . . . John was preaching a reversal of business as usual, a turning from the old ways, and this sets up yet another theme.  It’s dangerous to say to the powerful that they must change, it’s dangerous to imply that the path they are on is so morally bankrupt that they must turn around, do a figurative one-eighty, and go in the exact opposite direction.  Do you see the implicit rebuke in that?  Do you see the danger in preaching repentance to Herod and Pilate and Lysanias and Phillip?  Not to mention Annas and Caiphas, the two most powerful Jews in the land?

And of course,  John would pay the ultimate price for preaching change to the powers that be, and this passage foreshadows his beheading . . .  change of course is hard for anybody to stomach.  Especially if you have an ego as big as the Herods’.  But even in churches, where we’re supposed to be, you know, Christ-like.  We’ve all heard of church leaders—pastors and choir directors and elders—who have suffered the fate of John, who have been beheaded on the chopping block of change.

Well.  All this was done, says Luke, so that the scriptures would be fulfilled . . . John is that one crying in the wilderness predicted by Isaiah:  Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Smooth his way, make it easy for his passage.  "Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.”  The way shall be made smooth for the coming of the big-W word of God, the logos tou theou, the one for whom John is merely the prelude, the spear-holder, the warm-up act.

And here we are again, two thousand years later, and Jesus Christ is coming again, in a little over two weeks . . . and it falls upon us, in this time of waiting, this period of contemplation, to wonder where we are in all of this.  Have we made the ways straight for his coming?  Have we smoothed out the valleys, lowered the hills, removed all the barriers to the Word of God?

As his disciples, it falls to us to point out to our neighbors, to the culture in which we are embedded, that he is here.  It falls to us to proclaim the coming of the Lord . . . and have we done all we can to make easy the coming of Christ into our hurting world?  Have we resisted the siren call of the sparkling season, the consumer nightmare that is the most profitable season of the year?  Are we proclaiming the true Gospel, the big-W Word of God, or the happy-shiny message of the shopping mall, that all is right with the world, and pass me the X-Box, the Rolex and the Apple iPad mini?

Far from making smooth the pathways of the Gospel, do we put up barriers to its coming, roadblocks to its proclamation?  Are we stuck in the past, refusing to change so that the big-W Word of God can be proclaimed?  Have we resisted changing our old ways, our old modes of worship, beheading anyone who suggests that we do?

Sisters and brothers, advent is a time of contemplation, of preparation . . . far from being a happy shiny season, far from being fast paced and exhausting, it was meant to be slow and meditative, rich in thought and prayer.  And my prayer for us today is that it become that way again, that we listen to the words of God through John, that we slow down and smell the roses of Sharon.  My prayer is that we don’t rush to Christmas, that we savor its coming, for that’s what Advent means, Coming, which, believe it or not, is different from already here.  I say these words in the name of the one who creates, the one who comforts, and the coming one, who redeems us from our sins.  Amen.