Can Advent Break Through?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

December 7, 1997

Luke 3:1-6

When the Word of God comes among us, it really comes! Luke wants to make dead sure we know that. This God who breaks into our lives is no abstract religious feeling, no spiritual mumbo jumbo, no soft-brained speculation. The Word, writes Luke, breaks into our world during the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. That is how they counted time in Luke's era. They did not begin with the birth of Jesus; they numbered their years by the duration of Caesar's rule. Tiberius Caesar followed Augustus, and we know him by a penurious fiscal policy and harsh wielding of the law on his colonies.

And yes, in addition to Tiberius in Imperial Rome, there sits in Jerusalem Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, in charge of that rebellious and turbulent Province of Judaea. His job: keep it quiet. Calm it down. Shut them up or get rid of its recalcitrants.

And Herod, in charge of Galilee, one of two brothers, both Jewish sellouts to the Gentile colonialists, whose illusions of grandeur got the best of him--he wanted to be King--a bad idea--so Tiberius trumped up charges against him and Herod got dumped in a palace revolt in about the year of our Lord 39.

And Philip, Tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis, one of Herod's corrupt cousins, and Lysanius, Tetrarch of Abilene--these two are in charge of keeping the territory around Damascus in line. Luke has his politicians straight.

But Luke is not finished. He wants us to know who is in charge of the religious realm, too. It is Annas and Caiphas, High Priests, running their operations at the sufferance of the Roman puppets, power brokers all of them. It is into that world of big shots, Luke proclaims, the word of God arrives.

You see, to the citizens of Luke's time the people who really counted, those whose words made a difference, were those Caesars, tetrarchs, governors, high priests and their satraps. What they said, what they did, where they lived, who they commanded, how they operated--there, with those whom the citizens revered as gods, lay the word of the gods. They set the rules, granted the favors, decided who lived and who died. They played God and they played God decisively.

Sound familiar? Who gets the hearing today? Where do we find the little deities who deliver the words determining our lives? Who calls the shots? Do we bend and bow to those pundits scribbling for the op ed pages of the Herald or the Wall Street Journal, the Globe or the Times? Do we genuflect at the latest mod theory from an Ivy League psychologist or a foundation sociologist?

What of that solemn crowd gathered in Kyoto for the word on global warming, or the wise folk at the International Monetary Fund for the last word on global implications of the Korean monetary debacle? And yes, the word from Disney on what is entertainment, from MTV on what is music, from Martha Stewart on domestic chic, Liz Claiborn or Ralph Lauren determining the dress code, all of them and us truckling before the ubiquitous gods of market research who couch everything and everyone in what, finally, will sell. You see, here lie the forces, the locales, the principalities and powers--the Caesars and high priests of our own time--delivering their divine opinions and judgments that we listen to and obey as if they were the voice of God.

O friends, Luke knows what he is talking about. Just as he tells us this word of God breaks into that Roman world of Caesars and High priests,  so he would insist in our own time the word of God asserts itself in our world flooded by reputed cultural deities, the claimers and dispensers of profitable truth.

Yet Luke has something else up his sleeve. What he anticipates and proclaims does not come from a focus group, Merrill Lynch, Harvard, Nike or the Gallup Poll. It comes to us from a source and in a location far different from our currently accepted venues of style or information, fashion or money.

The word of God comes to us in the wilderness. The wilderness--that is where the voice of God utters its cry with the passion of a Hebrew prophet. And friends, in this close of the twentieth century, with all our pride in our scientific, technological and economic accomplishments, with unemployment down, inflation stabilized, and billions ready to be disseminated in Wall Street bonuses this year, we who listen for the word of God can find ourselves wandering in a bleak and barren religious desert.

And we do not have to look far for it. Perhaps today--right here, out on Boylston or Newbury Street--amid the Christmas rush the religious wilderness can engulf us.

Item: Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine began with a special item called, "Have a Multicultural Christmas." Did you see it? "Have a Multicultural Christmas." And it continues, "Thanks to a desire not to offend non-Christian groups, religious imagery has long been off-limits in New York store windows at Christmas. Increasingly, even secular holiday symbols are frowned on. Bergdorf Goodman windows feature 'no traditional Christmas or holiday decor,' but instead 'Legends, Goddesses, Heroines and Divas.' Henri Bendel is displaying a wreath in its main window but 'nothing like stockings or Santa,' says a spokeswoman. Barney's is celebrating the 'global power of fashion,' with a Siamese-twin mannequin and depiction of 'The Great Queens of England' (like Queen Victoria and Boy George.) On the (sort of) festive side, Paul Paddock, a designer for Antique Boutique, will display red gas cans this year. Desired effect? 'That whole red-gas-can, Christmas-holiday-spirit thing." Talk about wilderness!

Friends, more than anything else this day I would pray Advent would break through our cacophony of authoritative voices and our commercial dazzle. I would pray that the Word of God seeking, reaching, grasping for us would could finally touch us all in this wondrous season offering a promise of real hope against the false hopes pitched to us ad nauseum by the Caesars and high priests of our age. And I ask this morning, "What might such an Advent breakthrough look like amid "that whole red-gas-can, Christmas-holiday-spirit thing?"

I believe we will find a clue at this Holy Table. No red-gas-can-thing here. We discover at this table the Word of God present among us as a body cruelly broken, a life turned over to others and risked for love's sake to the point of death. At this table--under this Cross--we testify to an Advent hope that, in faith, finally conquers those forces setting us against one another, a faith that conquers the stresses tearing us up and getting us down; an Advent hope promising that where love abides even the worst of enemies can be reconciled and bound into a new tie with one another; a hope promising a presence beneath and around us, supporting, encouraging, undergirding us even as we feel the world falling apart; a hope that takes on even death itself. That is what this empty Cross is all about: a hope that takes on even death itself--and every enemy of life--tangles with it, and emerges on the other side transforming and triumphant, assuring us amid all evidence to the contrary that finally life and love, in whatever wilderness, bear the last word.

A gifted colleague of mine, Barrie Sheppard, captures, I think, the blazing light of the Advent breakthrough we encounter at this wondrous table. Brooding about this ragged figure of John the Baptist punching into that barren and merciless desert, Sheppard writes,

Could it be, perhaps, conceivable
that in every human wilderness,
the desert of despair,
the jungle of imprisonment or addiction,
the arctic waste of homelessness and hunger,
the scorching inferno of human hatred, warfare,
prejudice, and all forms of brutality,
a voice is to be heard that cries:
"Prepare the way of the Lord"?
In the concentration camps of Europe,
where human depravity surely reached its lowest
and its bleakest point, even there the tale is told
of those who rose above the terror and the desolation;
individuals whose faith in you [the love and hope of Christ],
 sustained them
through that darkest of all nights
and gave them strength to be
strength to others.

And after articulating this promise of an Advent breakthrough into this yearning world of ours, Sheppard goes on to ask, in a prayer that could be our own:

Is there a way, Lord God, in which
you call on me today to be a John the Baptist?
As I relate to those I meet at work or play,
make me sensitive, aware of all the wilderness
that borders on, even invades, at times,
this civilized world of mine: aware also
of your word, your genuine word of comfort.
So that when I meet a soul lost in the desert
I might be able to "speak tenderly to Jerusalem,"
to communicate by gentle, honest word and deed
the gesture, full of grace, which says:
 "Behold your God!"

Can Advent break through to me? to you? Bet on it!