Advent 2 B

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And the beginning of the Good News; the beginning of the Gospel, the story of Jesus the Christ starts not with the birth in the manger, or the baptism of Jesus, but instead with the voice of one (who is not Jesus) crying out in the wilderness. That voice belongs to John the baptist, or John the baptizer, and John is … well … John is different.

Your first impression of John, if you met him, might have been that John was pretty weird. He was doing his thing, not where respectable people do business in the town, but out in the wilderness. In the wild. And he looked weird: he wore clothes made of camel’s hair… he ate food off the ground. He looked like the kind of person that, if he was walking on your side of the street, would encourage you to cross over to the other side.

But, not only is John the baptist superficially different, but he is doing and saying something that makes him different, too. Instead of preaching a get-rich-quick scheme, or a nice comforting message that everything is going to be OK, John was proclaiming repentance. That means, he was telling people that they were doing it wrong. And that they needed to change the habits, their lifestyle, their beliefs. That the status quo needed to change. That is a different message than most. It’s also a message that will get you into trouble (and maybe you already know how the story ends up for John.)

Another thing that makes John different is that even though crowds of people were flocking to him. And even though people supported him, and trusted him — confessing their sins and being baptized by him — John did not claim to be the One.

He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.

John insisted not on his own power, but on the power of one to come. John is waiting, of course, for Jesus.

History is filled with charismatic preachers that abused their power, but John is different. John’s message is compared to another “different” messenger of God, the prophet Isaiah. We heard these words of Isaiah in our first reading:

A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 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. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Isaiah 40.3–5 NRSV)

And once again, you can get yourself in trouble preaching a message like this. Because of course, if the coming of Lord will bring evenness to uneven ground, that means that the ground you’re on — right now — is not even. And that can be challenging to hear. John, like Isaiah before him, preached repentance. “Repentance” is not exactly what you would call and comfortable theme. You won’t find many repentance cards at the Hallmark store. Hollywood does not churn out many Repentance movies. If you are at all like me, you maybe don’t appreciate when someone points out that the ground you’re standing on is uneven. Or that you’re in ‘a rough place’ — another phrase that Isaiah uses.

When the ground under your feet or my feet is called into question… it is uncomfortable. It can even be angering.

In workplaces and in classrooms and around dinner tables across our country, I imagine that there are some uncomfortable conversations going on this week about issues that have been in the news: issues about race and privilege. I would guess that some of you will find yourselves in a conversation this week about what has dominated the headlines: violence in our communities, and the effects of racism. Even as we would really rather be thinking about the peace of that Silent Night coming up, and the blessings in our families, and in our church… through the stories of violence comes the challenge, like an uncomfortable voice crying out in the wilderness, that the ground beneath our feet is uneven. So, what do we do when we are confronted with uneven ground, with the ‘rough places’? What do we do when we hear the crying of mothers who have lost their sons to violence, or when we think of police officers who begin every shift knowing they may be risking their lives? Or any of the uncomfortable situations in our lives? What do we do when the road gets bumpy?

Well, for one, we can deny it. We can hide from the problems and hope that they go away. Or, if we’re more arrogant, we can say, “that ground isn’t uneven at all.” Yes, we people of faith do this today, but it isn’t new: as the prophet Jeremiah said:

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.

There’s another option for when the road gets rough. We can give up. When we see the depths of suffering and we see the headlines over and over, it can seem like there is no hope. Or, maybe you’ve had the experience of reaching out your hand to make a difference and gotten burned — tried to help someone and got taken advantage of. Then, we’d be tempted to be like those that the prophet Zephaniah talks about, those who say:

“The LORD will not do good, nor will he do harm.”

In other words, God doesn’t make much difference either way, and we’re on our own in this world.

Neither of those options, denial nor giving, sound very good, do they?

Maybe that’s why so many people, the Gospel tells us, were heading out into the wilderness to hear this very different voice crying out. Maybe that’s why the whole Judean countryside, and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to John the Baptist — even though he was weird. Maybe, they couldn’t deny the unevenness anymore; couldn’t pretend anymore that the rough places in their lives together were actually smooth. And maybe they also weren’t ready to give up hope; maybe they wanted to believe that God still had a word for them.

John the Baptist proclaimed a different way. John’s words called them, and his words call us to live life now, in this world, as if every valley was lifted up, every hill made low, every uneven spot made level, and every rough place made smooth. In other words, don’t act as if our crooked world is just good enough, act as if was the way God intended it to be!

When I was a kid, I used to wonder at some of the weird things that my grandfather did. He was kind to people that weren’t kind back. He taught us to pray for others who probably weren’t praying for us. He shared things in a way that most people never did. I remember thinking that maybe he was really clever, and that the rest of the world would come around, and his way of living would actually make sense. Well, he died, and no, the world was not really any different. But, I realized, that he had made a habit of living his life as if the Kingdom of God was already here, and in fact, through him, the Kingdom of God had broken into my life, too.

How would your conversations go this week, if you knew the Kingdom of God was breaking in? How would you face people who are different from you, or people you disagree with, if you could act as if the world was being made into the way it should be?

Isaiah says that then:

the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.

Together.

This world is not yet the way it should be. We can’t deny it, and we can’t fix it ourselves. But there is one coming who is greater. There is one coming who will forgive us, who will lift us up, and make our ways even so that we can live together in peace.

And even though the world is still uneven, we can live in the Kingdom of God, now. Even if it makes us the ones who are … different