Reading: Luke 3:1-6
In the first two
chapters of the Gospel of Luke, two cousins are born – John and Jesus. In chapter three the story jumps ahead thirty
years. John has grown up and is in the wilderness
on the far side of the Jordan preaching about the coming of God’s salvation. He quotes from the prophet Isaiah, who 500 years
before had preached about the return of the people from their captivity to
Babylon. The story of that unexpected
liberation is deep within the memory of the people, and now they begin to look
for a new liberation in their day for a new way of living and a new world,
better for all than what they currently know.
The Rev. Dr.
Janet Hunt is a Lutheran pastor in northern Illinois. She writes a blog called “Dancing With the
Word” and a few years ago offered this reflection on the Gospel reading about
John the Baptist out beyond the edge of civil society proclaiming the coming of
the kingdom of God, and calling people to prepare the road for it to come on.
They finished laying the brick work on
what was once a through street outside my office window a few weeks ago. The city's decision to expand the public
library resulted in them closing our street permanently in order to accommodate
the addition. They removed the bricks
for a season and stored them away in a warehouse. Then they hauled them out again and laid them
one by one, end to end, to finish the cul-de-sac which now provides access to
our building's main entrance. Yes, most
of the streets in our city are ordinary pavement. A few, however, reflect a time long past
before asphalt replaced the quaint bricks which lined our paths.
One brick at a time, they were arranged, as you can see in the picture.
One brick at a time, they were arranged, as you can see in the picture.
As I hear John the Baptist today harkening back to the promises of Isaiah to a people in exile, I am reminded that preparing a way through the wilderness was more similar to this than what we in this century [or at least in this country] are normally accustomed to. Yet, I am reminded of a passing image of a young man with a shovel working to even out a road in Tanzania when I traveled there some years ago now. For most of time, making roads and pathways has been slow, hard work: one foot, one yard, one brick at a time.
So I wonder if this is maybe a way to think about our Advent journey. I get so captured by big, seemingly insurmountable problems too much of the time. I worry and I fret over the implications of racism, the experience of the working poor, the imminence of war, [the escalation of climate change]. Each and all of these problems and so many more require large scale solutions and sometimes they are called for in short order – far quicker than the time it would take to lay bricks one at a time in the wilderness. But still, seldom does a big solution come without the back-breaking, soul-stretching work of doing it one step at a time.
I wonder if all of us
these days are overwhelmed by the sheer size and magnitude of the issues we
face. If all of us at times find
ourselves not only captured, but consumed by problems, questions and crises far
beyond our ability to do anything about directly.
How many times have I
sat in The Second Cup in Westdale, one of my favoured sermon-writing spaces, at
my favoured table up against the front window, a little removed and at right
angles to the majority of the other tables farther inside the shop, and
overheard conversation after conversation between two people or among groups of
four or six or even nine, always animated and usually indignant about Trump,
the migrant caravan, and the Mueller investigation; about the UN report on
climate change, and the slowness of governments, big industry and humanity to
take responsible action; and about Facebook, social media, the new populism,
and Russian and Chinese domination of world politics?
And it’s not just in
coffee shops, where conversations of unrest have happened at least since the
days of the French Revolution. It’s also
in grocery store meetings of friends, at dinner parties and probably also at kids’
hockey games. It’s even in hospital
wards. For the past few days Japhia’s
room-mate has had regular visits from her husband and daughters and assorted
friends, and the group conversations around the bedside have been a lot more about
Trump than about anything else, including the woman’s recovery from a heart
incident.
We are anxious about
how the world is going. We worry and
talk incessantly about the bad news. We
are hungry for answers and a better way forward than we have found and we have
chosen so far.
I wonder if the
answer might be much the same as it was two millennia ago outside the bounds of
Jerusalem and around the river Jordan, and if it might sound something like
this:
In
the 18th year of the 21st century of the Common Era,
when Donald Trump was president of the
United States
and could not be ignored,
when
Elizabeth II was queen of the Commonwealth.
Justin
Trudeau was prime minister of the dominion of
Canada,
Doug
Ford was premier of the province of Ontario,
and
Fred Eisenberger was mayor of the City of Hamilton,
when
Richard Bott was moderator
of the United Church of Canada
at
the time when the Church was beginning
its time of restructuring,
the word of God came to Fifty United Church
on the border between
the
city of Hamilton and the region of Niagara.
And
that church went into the city and the region they bordered, proclaiming and
practicing a new way of seeing and doing things, to make all things new, as it
is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one church 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.’”
One of the messages
of the Gospel – and of Christmas, is that when it’s time to change the world
and open a pathway for a new way of being – God’s way of being to be born among
us, it’s not the rich and mighty, not the celebrities and the powerful and
important ones that God turns to. Not
the caesars and princes and tetrarchs, not even the high priests and pharisaic
leaders of the people. These people are
too tied in to the system that is, too much the beneficiaries of the injustices
that have been, too beholden to vested interests, and quite simply too
dependent on old notions of power to be free to share in a new way of doing
things differently, no matter what they say otherwise.
Which is why when the
good news comes, it comes to and through someone like John the Baptizer who has
left the city and its political, civil and religious institutions behind, let
himself live in the wilderness, and is actually free for a new thing. And why when, as we will hear next week when
the Sunday school offers their Christmas pageant and as we will remember
Christmas Eve, when the Christ child is born and the seed of God’s kingdom is
sown into the life of the world, it happens in the territory of the smallest
and weakest of the tribes of Israel and even there out back in a stable, and
it’s rough, unclean shepherds and alien scholars of forbidden astrological arts
who are called by the angels and by the cosmos to come and see, and then let
others know what is starting to happen.
It’s the little
people and ordinary folk, and the outsiders to the circles of privilege and
power who are God’s movers and shakers, the ones who prepare the way and build
the road for the kingdom to come into the world one brick at a time.
Just think of the
disciples Jesus called, and still calls.
And how the story of the Gospels is told one healing, one challenge, one
teaching, one meal, one story at a time.
And from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.
It makes me think of
what I see sometimes in The Hamilton Spectator.
Last Monday the headline across the whole of the front page was “Trump poised
to kill old NAFTA Deal” – confirming our sense that he just never goes away and
that while he is here all is unsettled.
The story just below it and filling the rest of the left side was “$6.8
Million Bill to ‘Waterproof’ Waterfront Trail?” – a local reminder of the steadily
increasing costs worldwide of climate change.
And the rest of the front section was similar kinds of news.
Except there was also
a story buried a few pages in headlined “The sheriff of King William turns in
his badge,” about Doug Crowder, a 75-year-old man who at the age of three was
hit by a car, was unconscious for 21 days and lost the sight in his left
eye. As a boy he attended Greensville
school but also pumped gas on the side and before he could write the Grade 8
final exams he went up north to paint cottages for the gas station owner. The principal said it was okay because he
wasn’t going to pass the exams anyway.
Not much was expected of him.
After that he had a
checkered journey of a variety of unskilled jobs, relationships with a number
of women along the way, and thirteen years ago enough money to buy a little
house in the city’s core on King William just west of Wentworth. The neighbourhood was rougher than he
expected, with bigger problems than he counted on and felt prepared to face.
He thought about
selling and moving out, finding a more comfortable and safer place to be. He also considered just hunkering in and
protecting himself in his own little private space.
But instead he set
about getting to know his neighbours, sharing things with them, and doing odd
jobs for them all around the neighbourhood, one after the other until that
became his life, and part of what made life good for him and his neighbours
together on that little stretch of King William.
Doug is now 75 and
living with cancer, most likely from having smoked all his life. In fact, a day after he was interviewed for
the story in The Spec he was admitted to St Peter’s. But as he got sicker over the past few years
neighbours started taking care of him, bringing him carrot cake, homemade
bread, pyjamas.
And isn’t that how
it’s done? How a pathway is opened and a
roadway is built for the kingdom of God to be born and to grow among us – how
we help the world work a little more like the way God desires it to be?
One brick, one foot,
one step, one yard, one relationship, one choice for someone else’s good, one
act for the good of the world at a time?
