The Angel’s Tale (Luke 2:1-20)

I always wondered what it would be like to be an angel.  No . . . really.  I mean, how would it be to be immortal?  Kinda cool, wouldn’t you say?  You wouldn’t have to worry about health insurance, about little Gabriel Jr. growing up and becoming 21 and going off your health plan, and you having to pick up some El-Cheapo 100-dollar-a-month plan that excludes everything but direct atomic attack, would you?  You wouldn’t have to worry about what to watch on TV that night, because you could probably look down and see a hundred-million dramas going on all at once.  But you have not much use for the lives of the mortals, to you who have lived so very long, their puny generations seem like seconds, nano-seconds, even . . .

And to you who are immortal, their cares and woes look like silly, little soap operas, like inconsequential insect-scrabblings, and you do God’s will—after all, you are God’s messengers—you appear with fiery sword in hand, calling the prophets to do whatever it is prophets . . . do, but otherwise you leave the humans to their own smelly devices . . .

But on this night it’s somehow different, it’s colder than Methuselah’s shovel, for one thing, the breath is coming out of everybody’s mouth like steam-engines, but that’s not it, really . . . it feels different, somehow, momentous, as if all heaven—and earth—is on the verge of something, and you’re part of the greatest show on earth, the heavenly chorus, and as you collect your folders and file in to the practice room, that one cold winter night, the director—this tallish blond angel with a full halo and impeccable taste—says “Word’s come from on high to expect something new this evening”—and immediately a groan goes up from the sopranos, they remember the last time they had to work a last-minute gig, something about Elijah being taken up to heaven or something, and they had to hit a G-sharp without even warming up . . .

And far below, you can hear a clatter, and if you squint and strain to peer around the altos, you can just make out old Gabriel, shining like the sun, and a bunch of ratty-looking shepherds, cowering in fear—you’re glad you’re this far away from them, if you know what I mean—and Gabriel always did like an audience, you grumble, but if you strain you can just barely hear what’s being said:  “Do not be afraid,” he says, and you think “Right . . . that ship’s already sailed” “Do not be afraid,” says Gabriel, “for Behold!”—this with a flourish—“I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people!” and the heavenly choir-director steps up to the podium and raises her baton, all the while listening to ol’ Gabe down below, and his voice is louder, now, he’s getting to the good part, to the point:   “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Messiah, the Lord.”  And the director cocks her head, straining to hear Gabriel’s pronouncement and ready the choir at the same time:  “This will be a sign for you” he says, and the director’s baton is raised just a little bit higher, and she’s almost vibrating with expectation, waiting for the cue, “you will find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”  And there it is, her hands flash down, and you respond, and from your mouths come the most magnificent sound, multi-leveled, multi-voiced, polyphonic, a great wall of cascading sound  . . . it is the most beautiful sound, you are sure, any of those puny mortals have ever heard, pure and wild, filling the heavens . . . and yet within it, you can make out the words—and you grudgingly admit all those enunciation exercises the director made you do have paid off, because clearly within the looming cacophony it can be made out: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward Humankind!”

And straining to look down, while the sound is still pouring from your mouth, you can see those silly, mortal shepherds, standing with their mouths gaping open, and a wondrously bright light pours down upon them—and they reach instinctively for their sunglasses—but just as suddenly as it came, the director cuts you off, and the sound stops on a dime, and so does the light, and self-satisfied, you look around in back of you toward the throne, straining to see what God the Creator thinks about it all, looking for some props from the ol’ Ancient of Days, and you almost fall off your riser: the throne is empty, bare, there is no God at home.

You are flabbergasted, floored, flibber-ti-gibbeted, because that’s never happened before in your life, God being missing in action, and you’ve lived a long, immortal, life . . .  well, it did happen one time, just after God created all those silly creatures, he spent an awful lot of time walking in that garden, talking with that Adam person . . . but since then, God’s been a rock, a Rock of the Ages, so to speak, and you are suddenly cold, bereft, it’s as if you were suddenly the loneliest person in the world . . . the God of Heaven, creator of the you, the universe, and all that jazz, has left the building.

And by the whoosh and flutter of wings all around you can tell the others are frightened, and when the shock has abated, and you look around at the rest of the Heavenly Choir, you can see it clearly . . . faces that for centuries showed only immutable joy, creased with worry, pocked with panic . . . feathers falling in a great rain, onto the ground below, piling up in drifts like so-much new-fallen snow . . . Henrietta, fluttering like some over-stuffed peacock, Thaddeus gibbering like a school-boy, and over in the corner, they’re pummeling Gabriel with questions, but it’s clear he knows no more than any other: “I have no idea where God has gone,” he said, “I just delivered a message, I’m just a messenger, like the rest of you.”

And suddenly, somebody spies those idiotic shepherds, slowly heading toward the west . . . and lo, there is a great star shining out in that direction, and you think: It clearly has something to do with them, might as well follow . . . and so you fold your wings like you taught the eagles to do and plummet toward earth, and as you look around you see you’re not the only one who decided to do that, there’s a whole host of heavenly bodies, dive-bombing the earth, and just before you crash into the shepherds, you pull up out of your bombing run, but so artful are you that it’s like a troubling little breeze, ruffling their greasy robes, and they look up, troubled, but you’re not visible to their mortal eyes unless you want them to be . . . and nobody wants that . . .

And so, on you go, the entire heavenly host, fluttering unseen above the shepherds, and you can’t miss the irony of it all: shepherds—the most lowly of them all, the lowest of the low, the outcasts of the outcast—leading all the finest that heaven can boast.  It’s like blind beggars, or penniless war veterans, leading the upper-crust of earthly society toward an unknown destination, like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet following a crank-addicted homeless man, trusting him to lead them . . . that’s what it feels like to you, like the whole social order has been . . . re-ordered, upended . . . and you think: “Man—the things we do for God.”  And you look around nervously, and shudder just a little, cause you don’t want to say what’s on your mind out loud “Wherever God might be, that is . . .”

Up ahead you see the star, and you’ve seen a lot of things in your immortal life, and you know—unlike these stupid mortals—exactly what stars are, burning balls of hot gas, and you know the earthly physics of it all, but it’s the weirdest thing: it’s as if the star is sitting right over this little backwater town, and after you enter it—the clueless shepherds and you, their silent stalkers—after you all enter it, you can see that the star is right over a barn!  You’ve never seen anything like it in all your immortal years—and that’s a lot of years—and the shepherds glance uneasily about—they can sense your presence after all—they glance uneasily about and duck into the low-hanging doorway, and all the heavenly host follow, and you’re glad your physics is meta physics—and you suddenly find out how many angels can dance in the doorway of a stable, and it’s a lot.

As you crowd in behind the shepherds you see a beautiful young woman—just a girl, really— and a bashful young man, barely able to shave . . . and over to the side are beasts of the pasture and birds of the air, but your eyes are drawn like a magnet to who it is lying in a manger, wrapped in ragged baby-clothes, face—how marvelous, a face!—shining like the sun.  You’d recognize that Person anywhere, in any guise . . . of course, it’s God the Almighty One, author of creation, Ruler of the Heavens, in the form of the humblest, most helpless thing of all, a little human baby.

And suddenly, the immensity of it all crowds into your head, and you can hear the rustling sigh of all you fellow choristers around you, and the sheep ba-a-a nervously, and the woman looks around in wonder, as all your questions are answered.  Here’s where God has gone: the most mighty being in all the universes has become the most lowly of creatures, a squalling, wriggling, infant, the most humble of these base human beings.  And it hits you like a sledge-hammer, how wonderful these creatures must be, these humans for whom—up until now—you wouldn’t cross even the most narrow street of gold, how wonderful these creatures must be that God would become one of them, to give up immortality even for just a season, to experience pain and heartache and death.  What a wondrous, magical, sparkling love that on cold winter’s night, God would shed all shred of God-hood and become a human being.  Amen.

Annunciation, the Sequel (Matthew 1:18-25)

     As we saw last week, Luke tells us about the annunciation of the Christ to Mary his mother . . . the angel Gabriel appears to her and says “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."  Notice it’s not the Lord was with you, or the Lord will be with you, or even the Lord will be with you if you do what God wants.  No, it’s the Lord is with you, God is with Mary, and what a remarkable thing to say, especially in that time and day when men were the priests, men were the scribes, men were the temple authorities.  Here the angel Gabriel comes to thirteen-year-old Mary, little more than property of her father, who will soon enough give her up so that she will be little more than property to Joseph her husband, provided he doesn’t—quite justifiably by 1^st century standards—cast her into the outer darkness, out into the wide, merciless world where she would be without a protector, without food or water, and would be reduced to begging or worse, Gabriel comes to this little slip of a quite helpless girl and says "The Lord is With You.”

And I can imagine she’s thinking “He’d better be, if I’m to become an unwed mother in first century Galilee” where even though she might not have been cast out into the outer darkness—Galilee was fairly cosmopolitan by Palestinian standards—she probably would have been packed off to stay with her Aunt Tilly, wife of Achmed the camel waterer, until after the baby came.

After she accepts her assignment, and the angel leaves, Luke proceeds not to the birth of Jesus, or to the shepherds keeping flock by night, but to her rendezvous with cousin Elizabeth, who as we saw last week, was pregnant with her own special child.  And Luke goes into great detail about the interaction between the two women, and culminates with the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, Mary’s paean to the absolute goodness of God.

Contrast that to this morning’s tale of annunciation, this time from Matthew.  First of all, he begins with the birth of Jesus:  “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”  And it’s worth noting that he ends this passage with it as well, by noting that Joseph “had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son, and he named him Jesus.”  Literary types recognize this device, this beginning and ending of a text with the same information, as an inclusio, and what is included, what is surrounded by the fact of Jesus birth, is his account of the annunciation: the account of the annunciation begins and ends with the birth of Jesus, it is wrapped in it just as the babe will be wrapped in those celebrated swaddling clothes tomorrow night.

Another thing to note is that where Luke’s version is Marian—and Elizabethan—centered around the women, who at least share the stage with the feckless Zechariah, Matthew’s version is all Joseph, all the time.  In the first half, it’s concerned with Joseph and what a good guy he was not to have her immediately stoned.  “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”  Whereupon she would have no doubt gone for an extended visit to Uncle Achmed and Aunt Tilly.

But riding to the rescue is an angel—we don’t learn if it’s Gabriel or not—who saves the day by appearing to Joseph and saying “Do not be afraid,” which should remind us of that other annunciation, but with a big difference: whereas in Mary’s version Gabriel is telling her not to be afraid of him, what he is not be afraid of here is taking Mary as his wife.  Don’t be afraid that she has cuckolded you, don’t be afraid of all the shaking heads and muttered insults that will come from your so-called friends and family when they get the news, but go ahead and take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

One of Matthew’s main concerns—other than the birth itself—is that his listeners know that Jesus is not an illegitimate child.  And just to make sure we get it he quotes from the prophets to seal the deal: “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’”  And Joseph wakes up—for the angel has come to him, as they often do, in his sleep—and does as the angel of the Lord has commanded him:  he takes her as his wife.  And just to make sure one more time that there is no doubt about who Jesus’ daddy really is, Matthew tells us that he had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son.

Now, one could be forgiven for thinking that all Matthew is worried about is making sure we don’t view Jesus as illegitimate.  He goes to great lengths to show that far from being ill-legitimate, Jesus is the height of legitimacy.  What is a scandal to Jewish society is diametrically the opposite for us Christians: he has the greatest, least-scandalous father of them all.

But what if that’s not it at all?  Or rather, what if that’s only part of it?  What if far from wanting to deny the scandalous nature of Jesus’ birth, his aim is to emphasize it?  After all, the more a person denies something, the more it is underlined.   And if we weren’t aware of Jesus’ lack of an earthly father before we heard this, we certainly were afterward.  To paraphrase Queen Gertrude from Hamlet, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us that for every act of communication there is a text and a sub-text.  That is, there is what the communication says on the surface—its plain-sense meaning, what the syntax communicates—and also what it says given the context in which it is said.  For instance the text of “The car is white” says something very concrete, and confronted with the statement alone, without any other contextual information, that’s what we expect to see: a white car.  But what if we hear this statement—the car is white—while being shown a picture of a car that is purple?   At the very least, it sets us thinking: that car is purple . .  . why are we being told that a purple car is white?  Is there a sense in which all cars are white?  Or is there something about the car that makes it metaphorically white?  White is a color that is a symbol of purity—is a statement being made about all cars being pure, no matter what it’s looks like on the outside?

In other words, contextual information—information that is literally with (in Greek con) the text—gives rise to a sub-text, a text that is under (sub) the plain-sense one.  It gives depth to a communication, and richness, and there is evidence that Matthew is doing it here, specifically in what he says right before this passage.  Like Luke, he begins his story with a genealogy, but it is different, in one very specific senses.  Luke, generally thought to be more inclusive, nevertheless includes no female ancestors.  Matthew, on the other hand, names four.  And what’s more, they are women who have somewhat scandalous sexual reputations . . . Tamar, who disguised herself to have illicit relations with her father-in-law . . . Rahab the prostitute who saved Joshua’s hide . . . Ruth, whose indecent behavior with Boaz saved the Davidic line . . . and Jezebel, the wife of Uriah, who however unfairly became an icon of the wanton woman . . . Matthew is ever-so-subtly emphasizing Jesus’ scandalous family history.  And he follows it with reference to the unmarried status of Mary which, to Palestinian society at least, carries more than a whiff of scandal.

And if his life begins as a scandal to the Jews, more than one observer has noted that his life certainly ended with one.  No less than the Apostle Paul writes eloquently of the foolishness, the contrary to good sense-ness of the crucifixion.  “. . . we proclaim Christ crucified,” he writes, “a stumbling block to Jews”—and in Greek that is scandal—“a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ (is) the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

And that’s what Matthew is saying here . . . far from excusing Jesus’ less than societally correct birth, he is pointing out the same thing as Paul: to Jews, his birth without an apparent father is scandalous, a stumbling block to their acceptance of him as Messiah, but for those who are called by God—no matter the language they speak or the color of their skin . . . Jews and Greeks and New Yorkers and even people from the region of Cincinnati . . . he is the power and might and the holy wisdom of God.

And in two short days we will be presented with it again, Christ will come again into our hearts and minds and souls.  Laid in a manger—the most ordinary and humble and, yes, scandalous place where a king of the universe might be born—surrounded not by courtiers and potentates and court hangers-on, but by cows and chickens and sheep and goats—in two days will be born a savior, who is Christ the Lord.  Hallelujah, amen.

Leap for Joy (Luke 1:39-45; Luke 1:46-55)

   Leap for joy!  Leap for joy!  Glory hallelujah, leap for joy!  For unto us will be born, only nine short days from now, in a manger – no room for his head! – unto us will be born a savior, who shall be called Messiah, the anointeed one, Prince of Peace.  And shepherds will keep watch on their flocks by night, and glory will shine all around, and lo!  Angels – angels! – will be heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plain.

     Luke begins his story – the story of Jesus – and by extension the story of the rest of us as his followers – with John the Baptist, leaping for joy in the womb at the approach of the Christ child, who himself was still in the womb . . .And that’s the way the story ends too, in the very last verses of Luke’s very last chapter, where the disciples react to the risen Lord with great joy . . . so the whole Christian story is packaged in joy, wrapped in it like a Christmas present . . . beginning in joy, ending in joy . . . joy is the Christian state, or it should be . . .

     But I wonder how Mary felt, as she rushed over to Elizabeth’s house . . . she’d just had an overwhelming experience, an angel had appeared to her and called her by name, and that isn’t something you see every day – I saw a bumper-sticker that said “I’m being watched over by an angel,” or something like that, and I wondered what the driver would do if one really appeared to her, she’d probably wreck her car . . . something like that happens in the play Angels in America, a God-fearing woman tells the main character – who’s dying and has been visited by an angel – she tells him that he shouldn’t be afraid, that an angel is “belief with wings,” and when the angel appears to them both, she is sore afraid . . . that may have been Mary’s reaction, too because almost the first thing out of the angel’s  mouth is “do not be afraid.”

     But if the apparition itself scared her, you can imagine what she felt when she heard the message: “you will conceive and bear a son, and you’ll name him Jesus, and he’s gonna be the Son of the Most High, he’s gonna inherit the throne of David and reign over his kingdom forever and ever, amen!”  But of course, there’s just one little problem – she’s a virgin, and unmarried to boot, not exactly a good thing, especially back when adultery could be grounds for being pummeled with stones until you’re dead.

     So maybe it wasn’t exactly joy she felt when she rushed over to Elizabeth’s place . . . it may have been panic that made her go in such haste, or she may have gone over there for confirmation, to reassure herself that it wasn’t all just a dream, to check out the other prediction the angel had  made, that her aged, barren relative was pregnant against all the odds . . . and of course, she gets confirmation, because the minute she walks in, Elizabeth’s baby leaps in the womb . . . and it’s proof that her cousin is pregnant, and that she is as well . . . and it’s somehow fitting that the one who confirms it is the infant John the Baptist, who will spend his career crying in the wilderness, proclaiming the Good News . . . John is the first one to sense the presence of God, the first one to feel the Christ child, and what did it bring to him?  Joy . . .

     But as for Mary, Luke relates no such thing, he records no Marian leaping about, no flapping of robes, not even a little hop, skip or jump . . . remember back when she first heard the angel’s prediction?  When she first learned that she is the mother of the future, she simply, quietly – and without fanfare – says yes: “Here am I,” she says, “the servant of the Lord.”

     Bernard of Clairvaux – a founder of the Cistercian Monastic order – speaks eloquently of this moment: “Answer quickly, O Virgin.  Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord.  Answer with a word, receive the Word of God.  Speak your own word, conceive the divine Word.  Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal Word.”   Saint Bernard makes it beautifully clear the interplay of human speech and God’s Word, both from the Angel, and in Mary’s womb . . . for it is in her womb that the Word incarnate matures, it is the Word of God she soon will embrace in her arms, God’s Word she will soon feed and shelter and clean . . .

     And now that Mary’s come to visit, now that John’s leapt in her cousin’s womb, suddenly it’s Elizabeth that’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and though she knows not of the angel’s predictions, she cries out . . . “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”  The Spirit’s filling has made a prophet of her it seems, it has filled her with that same Word of God, so that when she speaks it tumbles out of her, and she is with knowledge and authority . . . “Blessed are you among women . . .”

     Was this news to Mary?  That she was blessed, I mean?  The angel had spoken, she’d obediently received the word—“here I am,” she’d said “I’m your servant,”—and then rushed off to visit her relative, and maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t feeling all that blessed . . . here she was, engaged to be married, and now she was gonna be pregnant, and even if her and Joseph were to get hitched right away, she knew her family – and all the neighbors – could count, for Pete’s sake. But the Spirit had come upon Elizabeth – she could see it in her face and her eyes – and after that, Mary knew she’d be blessed.

     So she responds with the song we read earlier, the Magnificat, sung every evening to this day in monasteries around the world – “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  Her whole being – the Greek word here is psyche – her whole self praises the Lord, it increases God’s greatness, it rejoices – there’s that joy again – in God the Savior.  And why?  Because – and here’s the heart of the matter – because God has looked with favor on her lowliness, God has been mindful of her humble station, her humility, her low position in life.  And once again, we’re reminded – as we were at the annunciation – that she is a servant of God.  “God has looked with favor” she says “on the lowliness of his servant.”

     And our readings for today revolve around two axes, two poles if you will: joy and service.  John leapt for joy at the nearness of God, and Mary rejoiced at the coming incarnation.  At the same time, Mary proclaimed her status as servant, her servanthood, and we know what will happen to John – he will be martyred in the service of the Lord.  So the question is: Could the two be related?  Could joy and service be somehow intertwined, perhaps two sides of the same coin, in the kingdom of God?

     My daughter Emily used to schlepp food and drink for a living – she earned her keep as a waitress.  And it’s a brutal, thankless way to make a buck.  I remember when she was working at a little café in mountains of Northern Georgia, and we went up to visit her, and there was a customer who was snide, demanding and dismissive, all at once, who made Emily’s life hell, so she was close to tears, all because she was a servant, and that customer – for the moment, anyway – was the boss.  Far too many customers assume that waitresses are low-class women without skills, beneath conversation and consideration.  Too often, they are snubbed and underpaid and ignored. That’s why Suzy Hansen, writing in Salon magazine, says the world can be divided into two kinds of people: those on the customer side of the tray, and those on the waitress side.  Those on the customer side are the proud, the arrogant, the disdainful.  Those the waitress side are the humble and the harassed.

     For those on the waitress side of life, joy is not usually associated with serving those on the customer side, the two are generally mutually exclusive . . . they exchange their work, they exchange themselves, for food or money, they work for demanding people who treat them, well . . . like servants.  Mary was definitely on the waitress side . . . all women were, in those days . . . they were little more than property, little more than tools of the men around them . . . Mary was a servant long before she came to be pregnant with the Christ child – a slave of every man in her life.  That’s why she spoke of her lowliness, her humble estate . . . she was a second-class citizen in ancient Palestine.

     But God chose someone on the waitress-side of life to bear and nurture God’s own son.  God chose someone who was of lowly estate, who was a servant to her father and uncles and – soon – to her husband Joseph – to be honored above every other person alive.  Mary of Galilee became Mary Theotokos, as the Greek Orthodox call her:  Mary God-bearer, most highly-favored Lady.  And she entered her servanthood to God gladly, she rejoiced in God her savior, because through this service, through this labor – if you’ll pardon the pun – she would be mightily blessed.

     According to Roy Medley, General Secretary of the American Baptist Convention, servitude and servanthood are very different. He says that servitude is imposed, servanthood is embraced; servitude enslaves, servanthood emancipates; servitude denigrates, servanthood uplifts; servitude crushes, servanthood fulfills.  Servitude despairs, servanthood rejoices!  Mary certainly does that, she certainly rejoices in her servanthood, she sings about it with her whole being, with her whole soul.  But she sings about more, as well: “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,” she says “and has lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”  And this last line is servant imagery, as if at a lunchroom, or a restaurant, where the hungry come to the table and are filled, and there’s God, waiting tables and bussing the dishes, and if you are in need, and rely on the Lord, God says “be there in a minute, hon” but if you’re self-reliant and proud and arrogant, well . . . you don’t need any service, do you?  So you’re sent away empty . . . in this image, it’s God who’s the servant, God who’s on the waitress side of life . . .

     And Jesus Christ, the one whose coming we look for today, lived there as well.  He who came to free the oppressed, bring Good News to the poor and set the prisoners free lived his entire life on the waitress side, serving God by serving humankind.  And in the end, he gave his life in that service, so that we might be set free.

     That’s the relationship between service to God and joy, one flows out of another . . . and the key to Christmas is not the presents waiting under the tree, not the hustle and bustle of holiday cheer, not even the chestnuts roasting on an open fire.  At Christmas we contemplate the coming of our savior, who has looked with favor on our lowly estate, and has shown us that our joy is to be fulfilled when we become servants of God ourselves.

          So let us leap for joy!  Glory hallelujah, leap for joy!  For unto us, in the City of Bethlehem – only nine short days, now! – will be born a savior, who shall be called Prince of Peace, Son of God, Messiah.  Unto us shall be born a servant, Christ the Lord!  Amen.

“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.