Endure
Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6

December 7, 2003

The most important part about waiting for Christmas during Advent is the use of our imagination. Imaginations have created entirely new worlds and ideas. When we stop being imaginative about Christmas, like a little child, then it will no longer matter. Imagination is not a one-time thought or event; imagination has to endure, to keep on going when things aren’t that rosy, and that’s another level of thinking.

Our first stumbling block is imagining how Christmas can be different from the way we know it. Jim Cain, the Uniting Church in Australia minister, with whom I worked used to tell me about Christmas in Australia. The big family service would not be on our Christmas Eve, but Christmas morning itself. You know, that’s the middle of the Australian summer - hot, humid, sunny - can you imagine that? Or is that just plain cruel given our last month?

Was the Gospel ever meant for weather like this? The saga of John the Baptist coming out of the wilderness to preach a baptism for repentance for the forgiveness of sins presumes hot weather, an eccentric man sunburned and tanned like leather. Was the imagination of John wide enough to conceive of the River Jordan freezing over?

The imagination of Luke was certainly alive in the narration of these events. The first verses of Chapter 3 may be the most historically precise passage in the Bible. The 15th year of Tiberias Caesar would be 29 A.D. according to Roman records. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea from 26-36; Herod Antipas and Philip, along with Lysanias were tetrarchs of the jurisdictions to the north of Judea. Annas was high priest, and his father-in-law Caiaphas, a former high priest, still had too much influence.

John got started exactly then, called specifically by the word of God to say exactly what he would say. Of course, the message was ultimately about Jesus, though John did not know then it would be exactly Jesus. The scandal, the stumbling block of the Gospel, is not that God would send a Messiah, a saviour; but that he would send one right then, exactly at that time. It is not too hard to say that God sends a saviour somewhere sometime, but to say that this particular human being who lived exactly during these years in the society containing particular people we know about is a challenge for any imagination. It is the reason why many people today, cultured despisers of religion you could call them, reject the idea of the incarnation of Jesus.

There’s a great line in the musical Jesus Christ, Superstar. Judas berates Jesus, “Now why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land? If you’d come today you would have reached a whole nation; Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.” If Jesus really wanted to spread his word and ministry to the entire world, he chose an awfully inefficient time. Today the internet, television and radio would make the possibilities infinite. What was so unique about that time that the Word became flesh, dwelt among us, and people actually listened?

Are we infinitely better than 1st century Palestine? We prefer to think so with the superiority of modernity. A rock and roll ballad claims, “Sam Cook didn’t know the things I know.” How could people before TV and radio come to any enlightened decisions? What they knew is no longer current and valid, and so what can you say regarding those backwater visionary Jews we now call Christians? There was the real threat of the ruthless Roman army ravaging the Holy Land, but how can their dilemmas parallel ours when there is a real atomic bomb?

It is convenient, however, to have had it all happen when Tiberius was the Roman Emperor, and not when Jean Chretien is Prime Minister. They didn’t know what we know now, so their word is not relevant or useful for our contemporary situation. It’s simply full of pre-scientific myths and fables, so we only have to treat them as such. And the other half of the argument is that Jesus came to a simple time and place; we can’t imagine, we refuse to imagine that something like the Jesus Movement could burst upon our complex world today.

Yet the universal is always found in the specific, in the individual. John the Baptist did not appear in a pristine, bucolic society. He came from the community of the Essenes, a radical Jewish sect that lived on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth and certainly one of the hottest. The Essenes lived there because they were convinced that Jerusalem had gone to the dogs morally, and they wanted to remain pure and devoted to God. John came armed with those convictions to a people occupied and oppressed by a foreign power that preferred the strategy of cultural genocide. Many Jews were lured by the seduction of Roman power and success to compromise their religious convictions.

What does John preach to these confused people, many of whom no longer knew what it really meant to be a Jew? He cited Isaiah 40:3-5 that was a word of hope to the Israelites in the midst of their exile in Babylonia. We believe that it is only our world that is full of violence and injustice, so many Bosnias, Belfasts, West Banks, and Twin Towers.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Get ready now, for the time is right, right now. The picture is the usual one in those times when a king came into town for a visit. You went out and fixed or even laid a road, making it as smooth and as straight as you can. “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.” Wonderfully poetic language, to be sure, but there is the sense of urgency that no effort shall be spared, that one must throw all of one’s heart and soul and energy into this preparation, because there is no other time to do this, for now is the right time.

We are happy to consign the Gospel and the Nativity, the Incarnation of Jesus, as well as his crucifixion and resurrection to an ancient, used-up time which we are able to smugly ignore as irrelevant, because we are afraid that this century might be the Right Time.

Each year that you and I wait, the power of the Good News is that it is the Right Time, the Right Time for God to intervene and interrupt our superiorly knowledgeable universe. It is the Right Time to prepare the way of justice and freedom, to live in a way that does honour to all kinds of people, to insist that every function of our personal lives and of society and government are motivated by and carried out through a genuine and deep respect for the integrity and dignity of all of God’s children and all of God’s creation. You might even go so far as to call that motivation by an ancient mythological, pre-scientific expression, agape, or love. It is precisely the Right Time.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan