Good morning, happy second Sunday of Advent. My kids this year were delighted that Advent started right on December 1 and actually for once matched the days on their Lego Advent calendars. Because often Advent starts at the end of November, and they never understand why the church makes everything this time of year so confusing.
To which I say, We're the ones who made all this up. The church set this calendar. We’re in the right. Got that? From the date, to the meaning, to how we're to comport ourselves this season, the church gets to say!! Few may be listening, but we still try.
Today and next week, the second and third Sunday Advent, we're with John the Baptist—this week, both in his adulthood and infancy.
The adult John in the Gospel reading this morning reminds us of the season of Advent’s roots in self-examination and preparation. It’s like a preview of Lent. The practice among Christians near the end of the year of examining oneself and preparing for Christ's second coming probably came before the celebration of Christmas took hold, and eventually the two were combined. That may be why we have this kind of double theme in Advent of the first and second coming of Christ. The second coming is always how Advent begins, as we saw last week.
If it is an accident of history, it's one rich with meaning. Advent and Christmas together give voice to our dual feelings of peace and security, on the one hand, knowledge of God being with and among us. We don't have to make that happen. God is here. We are "preapproved." But on the other hand, we still feel incomplete, and we know God can't be finished with our world. For some those feelings are especially strong this time of year.
There's something still to come, and that's expressed in our longing for a return, for God to finish, and make things whole. We live in this tension, what Christianity sometimes calls the "Already--Not Yet," and we have to learn how to be faithful in it.
I re-read parts of Dorothy Day's memoir last weekend and was reminded of her description of one of the priests she admired at the Lower East Side Mission where she worked: "He knew how to love the world as it is, and yet yearn and work for a better world."
Christ has come. Christ will come.
We also, in today's readings, go back to the beginning of John the Baptist's life, and here's where Advent starts to feel more like preparation for Christmas.
This is the sweetest story. For being such a challenging firebrand as an adult, John’s birth is adorable, even whimsical. These are not words one thinks of when describing John the Baptist, and yet that’s how Luke tells his origin story. The Metropolitan Museum of Art guide to the Gospels says that the Nativity, the birth, of John (which also has its own feast day on June 24) produced some of the most touching, earthbound, and everyday portraits of a birth scene in Renaissance art.
The canticle, which replaced our Psalm for this morning, is called the Benedictus, or the Song of Zechariah. We read it every third year during Advent, when we're in Luke's Gospel. Advent, by the way, also begins a new liturgical year when we change Gospels, in this case it was from Mark's to Luke's. Luke's Gospel contains the birth stories we know so well from Christmastime, and also these canticles, songs, that feature so prominently in the birth stories: the song of Mary, or Magnificat, the Song of Simeon, which we call the Nunc Dimittis. And the Song of Zechariah, the Benecticus.
John was born six months before Jesus. Zechariah was his father. He and John’s mother Elizabeth were late-in-life parents. They’d wanted a child, and prayed for a child, and finally one year after Zechariah made his yearly offering at the Temple, the angel Gabriel appears to him and promises that his wife Elizabeth will conceive.
Zechariah doesn’t believe the angel and, for that, is struck mute for the duration of his wife’s pregnancy -- [to which I say,] not a bad deal for her! Nine months later, John is born, God opens Zechariah’s mouth and he speaks--in poetry--these words of the Benedictus:
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; *
he has come to his people and set them free.
He has raised up for us a mighty savior, *
born of the house of his servant David.
Through his holy prophets he promised of old,
that he would save us from our enemies, *
from the hands of all who hate us.
To this point, you might think Zechariah is talking of his own son, a proud father boasting of his child’s future greatness. But he goes on:
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.
I’ve preached in years past on how remarkable it is for a father, especially one who waited so long to have a child, to want nothing more than that his son prepares the way for another. Not that he be great, or first, or successful, but that he becomes the herald of another’s success. John, the forerunner.
And his wish for his son came true. John would grow up to be both a firebrand and a deeply humble man, who preached repentance and of the coming of one “greater than he,” Jesus, whose sandals he, John, wouldn’t even be worthy to untie, as he said.
Every Advent for almost 2000 years, John stands here to remind Christians that this is our calling too: to be humble, to be last, to prepare the way for others, not ourselves, because in doing that, we’re preparing the way for God. Amen.