Advent 1C, December 9, 2012; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of the prophets, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This Advent, like most every Advent, I find myself wishing for some pre-holiday quiet – at least in worship! But John the Baptist is always loud. It’s hard to get a sense of just what kind of loud he is from the first six verses of Luke, chapter 3, when, in many of our heads, the prophet Isaiah’s words are accompanied by beautiful music from Handel’s Messiah. But in verse seven, which we will hear next week, John the Baptist shouts to folks who have come out to be baptized by him – mind you, they have come to receive the very baptism of repentance that he was calling for – and he yells at them, “you brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. If you don’t, you are like a tree that is cut down and thrown into the fire.” John the Baptist is loud and he’s in a very bad mood. He’s wild-eyed and hopping mad. John the Baptist is not the patron saint of sipping tea through a peppermint stick for a straw.

And so, liturgically, we are deliberately setting the context for our celebration of the nativity in two weeks and two days, not with quiet reflection, but with disturbing visions from the Gospel of Luke. We began last week looking through the lens of the brink of the passion. This week and next week we look back a little further through the lens of John the Baptist. Luke paints a picture of John the Baptizer as a cousin to Jesus. Perhaps they were blood relatives, but none of the other evangelists mentions it and I don’t think that’s what Luke is trying to portray. I think it’s their work that was closely related – their purposes were so akin to one another, that it was as if they must have known one another before they were even born.

Luke’s audience would have immediately recognized John the Baptist as a prophet using words from Isaiah. And Luke’s audience would have immediately recognized John the Baptist as a prophet just like Jeremiah. They were both consecrated before birth. They both predicted judgment at the end of the age, proclaimed God’s saving grace, and announced that God’s new covenant was available to everyone who repented. The books of Isaiah and Jeremiah are set in the contexts of specific points in history with references to the reigns of particular kings. So Luke dates the moment of this story of John the Baptist: It was in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod ruled Galilee, and his brother Philip ruled Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruled Abilene, and during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas – a not so subtle point is made here by grouping Israel’s religious leaders with the oppressive Roman Empire, that they were all cut from the same cloth in Luke’s view. This is the list of Who’s Who of government and religious authority.

And yet, what Luke wants us to know is that there was a moment in history (perhaps 26 or 27 of the Common Era) when a word (not the word – there’s no definite article here), a word of God came to John in the wilderness: a word came to a nobody in the middle of nowhere. A timeless word of God came to John – a word that Isaiah heard in something like 738 BCE, that the compiler of the book of Isaiah put on a scroll more than a century after that, a word that Luke recorded two generations after John’s ministry, a word coming to us almost two millennia later! Here is a word of God for all people for all time.

John was in a particular “middle of nowhere” at the Jordan River. And he was in everyplace that is wilderness. Wilderness is the place of formation for God’s people – a place of disorganization and dispute, of loss and grief, surprising beauty and even intermittent joy, of vulnerability and dependence on God, in other words, a long spiritual journey. Here is a word of God for our particular place on our particular spiritual journey. Here is a word of God for all people for all time in all places – all kinds of nobodies in all kinds of nowheres – all flesh.

Rather than being “a claim in the literal or plain meaning of the term, [that all flesh will see the salvation of God, perhaps this is] a word of hope that is rightly echoed in a new voice in each situation of despair. Its meaning may lie not so much in how it is fulfilled in any given moment in time, but in how true it is in every moment in time.” [1]

It seems to me that this echo of a word of hope has to do with being called to immerse ourselves in repentance. Baptism is about immersion. The word baptize and immerse are synonymous in the New Testament. What does it mean to immerse ourselves in repentance? It means to change. Repentance is not about being sincerely sorry, regretful or ashamed. Repentance is about changing – returning to God, returning from alienation to reintegration, from estrangement to reconciliation with God, remembering our citizenship in the realm of God. What does it mean to immerse ourselves in forgiveness of sin? It means to give ourselves and others a fore – a future. It means freeing ourselves and others to move forward. It’s not easy, and we need help (a lot of help), but the cost of not doing it is so much greater than the cost of immersing ourselves in forgiveness.

This past Tuesday I accepted an invitation from the wife of a colleague to go to a brunch at a community non-profit in Dorchester. When I accepted the invitation, I didn’t know anything about the non-profit, but my colleague’s wife is on the board and she seems like a nice person. Besides, the invitation came two months ago, when my calendar seemed eerily open in the first week of December. About two dozen other ministers crowded into a small conference room – an upper room in a building on Dorchester Ave. Perhaps you will recognize the name of the organization – it’s called The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute.

As we ate a simple breakfast, the President and CEO introduced herself as the mother of a young man, Louis Brown, who was 15 years old when he was hit by a stray bullet from a gun fight two blocks from where we were sitting. On December 20, 1993, in the middle of the afternoon, on his way to the Christmas party of the group he’d just joined, Teens Against Gang Violence, Louis was killed. His mother, Tina Chery, told us that she has dedicated her life to transforming her grief, her pain and anger into power and action through this Institute, for homicide victims’ families and also perpetrators’ families, for teaching non-violent conflict resolution to students in the City of Boston, for educating the public about the causes and consequences of violence, and for mobilizing the community to change our ways.

The list of accomplishments of this organization is remarkable, and yet the road to ending violence is long, and there are many many obstacles in the way. When she finished speaking, she introduced a woman sitting at the table with us. Doris Bogues rose to tell us that she is the mother of the young man (Charles Bogues) who was convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting of Louis Brown, and who is about to be released from prison on parole after serving the last 16 years in prison. The two women are working together to do everything possible to ensure his successful reintegration into the community. Of course they have no guarantee that their efforts will be successful, but they are doing what they can, together.

In light of our scripture, their story compels me to ask, what repentance – what change are we being called to on this winter morning? What forgiveness of sin might we be immersed in today? What way are we being called to prepare? What needs to be leveled or cleared or smoothed so that all flesh will see the salvation of God? This Advent, let us once again immerse ourselves in repentance – in change. Let us immerse ourselves in the forgiveness of sin, because we have work to do. We have work to do.

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