Second Sunday of Advent
Texts: Luke 3:1-6;
Mal 3:1-4; Phil 1:3-11
YouTube: https://youtu.be/LRdhTCKg8-w
See also the Sermon Notes, with additional information
PREPARING THE WAY OF THE LORD: LEVELING OUT
INEQUITY FROM OUR HISTORY WITH NATIONALISMS OF ALL KINDS
There appears to be a strong theme in today’s readings. In the First Reading from Malachi, the Lord himself proclaims, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.” In the Second Reading from Philippians, Paul is speaking about preparing ourselves for the “day of Jesus Christ” — another way of talking about the coming of the Lord. Finally, in the Gospel Reading, Luke describes the appearance of John the Baptist in terms of the Isaiah 40 passage about a messenger, crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
Prepare the way of the Lord. That’s clearly our theme for the day. The question is, What does that mean? Prepare how? What is the Way of the Lord? To begin to answer these questions, I’d like to sing for you the reading we didn’t read, the Psalm. And the Psalm assigned for today is one of the rare instances of a song not taken from the Book of Psalms. Today’s Psalm is Luke 1, verses 68-79, where Zechariah breaks into song at the birth of his son, John the Baptist. He holds his newborn son in his arms and sings this magnificent song, known through Christian history as the “Benedictus,” from the first word of the song in Latin. For many centuries, this song has been sung in Christian communities, especially monasteries, as the Gospel Canticle in the Morning Prayer service of the Daily Hours. In seminary, we had morning prayer Monday through Friday, and often used the liturgy for Morning Prayer in the front of the Green Hymnal (Lutheran Book of Worship). You can find it beginning at page 131. We are also going to sing a hymn version of Zechariah’s song to John the Baptist as our Communion hymn this morning.
But I’d like for us this morning the last part of the song from the Morning Prayer of the Green Hymnal, because it holds a special place for me. Our eldest son, Joel, was born on November 3, 1986, a little more than a year into my first call as a pastor. That means it wasn’t far removed from those seminary days of singing Morning Prayer. This song popped into my head as I planned my son’s baptism at the beginning of Advent 1986. Holding my firstborn son in my arms for baptism made me think of Zechariah holding John the Baptist in his arms, singing the Benedictus. So being the pastor-father, I took the privilege of adding something to the usual baptism liturgy that morning: Zechariah’s song. Holding Joel in my arms, I sang the following from the old Green Hymnal version of Morning Prayer:
You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,
to give his people knowledge of salvation
by the forgiveness of their sins.
In the tender compassion of our God,
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.1
Think, for a moment, of the baptisms most precious to you — the baptisms of your children and grandchildren — and godchildren, those nieces or nephews or friend’s children for whom you acted as baptismal sponsors. Most of us, baptized as infants, can’t remember our own baptisms. Perhaps we’ve seen photos. What I want to invite us to consider as we picture those baptisms in our minds is that all of us are given the calling of John the Baptist. We are God’s children to prepare the Way of the Lord. You and I are called as messengers to prepare the way of the Lord.
And, believe me, the task hasn’t grown any less urgent, right? As Zechariah sang, by the tender compassion of our God, we are being sent to those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. I feel like we are entering into one of those times again. Brothers and sisters in Christ, we have fellow citizens who are telling us and warning us straight-forwardly that we are about to be living under the shadow of Christian Nationalism — which, as we’ve been exploring for many months now, is decidedly not the way of peace. You and I, like John the Baptism, are tasked with being messengers to guide God’s children into the way of peace. I’m afraid we are not tasked with simply keeping our heads low and trying to ride out the storm. We are tasked with cryin out in the wilderness with the message of true peace.
Now, this is made more difficult by the historical facts that the message as we’ve been taught it has been mixed with the untruths from the ways of this world instead of the way of the Lord. We’ve wandered off the way of the Lord in some respects and need to once again make straight the way of the Lord. We’ve been talking about the need to revitalize our message, realizing that that might be a significant reason why our children and grandchildren, whose baptisms we were just recalling, are mostly absent from our churches these days. Well, now our reason for retooling and revitalizing our Gospel message has just been made even more urgent. Many of our fellow citizens — for whom we are called to love unconditionally, just as we are loved unconditionally — are being drawn to the way of Christian Nationalism, which is not a way to peace. In the weeks and months ahead, we must re-dedicate ourselves to our baptismal callings to speak the message which leads to going the way of the Lord, the way of true peace.
Two weeks ago, I did some summarizing of where we’ve been over this past year in revitalizing our Gospel message. Let’s recap that even more briefly. To me, the number one thing which Jesus reveals to us is that God is love, which means — and this is the part I think we’ve lost sight of — that God is completely nonviolent. We know this because the cross and resurrection reveal the nature of our human violence. On the cross, Jesus intentionally suffers our typical human violence in order to expose it as violence. In doing so, he is also revealing who God truly is. God is love. Period. Full stop. The power of a love which even goes to the lengths of suffering our violence in order to ultimately defeat it, to forgive it, to transform it into a way of peace. The resurrection is God’s promise that the deadly powers of our human violence will ultimately be defeated by God’s power of love, which is the power of life itself. So our job number one of preparing and living into the way of the Lord is to champion the way of love — which can never be a way that chooses violence. To the extent that Christian Nationalism justifies the use of force, it can never be considered truly Christian, because the way of the Lord is nonviolent. This is the homebase of our message, that the power of love is the center of everything.
This morning I’d like to add another piece to our revitalized message. I think it is part of the prophecy which Luke inserts from Isaiah, about making straight the paths of the Lord. Let’s begin with our own translation of Isaiah 40, verse 4: “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” This is about a leveling out, but a leveling out of what? My proposal to you is that it’s about a leveling out of God’s family, the family of humankind and our earth home. None of us has the role of parent, because that’s taken by God. Which is why the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is never really enthusiastic about kings and emperors, about those who try to elevate themselves into the role of parents, into the role of those who supposedly know better and should rule over us. Instead, God wants us to truly see ourselves as brothers and sisters who are equal not is the sense of our individual talents and gifts but in the sense that God truly loves each of us with an equally unconditional love, like a good parent. God wants us as children to discover our gifts and talents and pool them together, in order to serve one another, in a mutual service, and help each other to flourish.
This means that the old ways of elevating some to positions of power and lowering others to positions of servitude must be straightened out. There must be a leveling, where those of high position are brought lower, and the lowly are lifted up. In two weeks, we will hear Mary sing about just this kind of leveling. This is another crucial point in our messaging in the face of Christian Nationalism, which wants a return to the old human ways of having some people clearly in charge to rule over others, instead of ruling together, alongside one another. I invite us to see once again the ideal of our American experiment with democracy, this seeking to live into the principle that all people are created equal. Many of us see the past fifty-plus years as having made progress towards that ideal of a leveling out into a true democracy. Where the powerful are brought a bit lower and the powerless are lifted up higher. Christian Nationalists mock this as being “woke,” and they straightforwardly call for a return to earlier times like the 1950s when men had charge over women, and yes, whether they admit this part or not, when white people had charge over people of color.2 And, of course, the center of their agenda is that those calling themselves Christian should be in charge over those who don’t consider themselves Christian.
Brothers and sisters, I’m willing to quit calling myself Christian if that’s what it means. Which is why one of my main messages is that Jesus didn’t come to convert us to a new religion called Christianity. Jesus came to call us into a better way of being human. A way of being human based on the power of love and never force. A way of being human in which there is a leveling out, where no one human being or group of human beings is made to rule over the others. So in this time of dwelling in darkness and the shadow of death, you and I are called to the same task as Zechariah’s son John. You and I are called to be voices crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 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; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, December 8, 2024
YouTube: https://youtu.be/LRdhTCKg8-w
Notes
1. Lutheran Book of Worship (Augsburg Fortress, 1978), p. 135.
2. See the Sermon Notes for Bonus Material, primarily on the architect of modern Christian Nationalism, who wrote in his book The Next Conservatism: “we should be fighting to return to family structures of the 1950s.”
