December 9, 2012
Advent 2 Peace
Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 3:1-4
(prayer)
An 81 year old parishioner in Spain wished to serve her church by taking it upon herself to restore a 19th century fresco of Jesus which had been damaged by years of neglect and moisture. By all reports, she did this with the best of intentions. Not everyone likes her ‘new Jesus’ created out of an act of faithful service.
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At this time of year, we are sharing old stories. For some John the Baptist might be a new story, but for others, you’ve heard it before ... maybe many, many times.
But let us admit that each time we hear the stories of Advent, it is in a new context.
Advent is a time of preparation (for Christmas). Are we prepared for the reality that the impact of our sacred stories HAVE to be slightly different each time the story is told in a new time and place?
If we believe that our scriptures are dynamic, they are alive for us, they must have new things to show us.
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John the Baptist spoke to people of his time about the need to renew one’s faith – and he also pointed to new and exciting times to come. Let us be prepared to accept the old stories as new for this time and context and let us be watchful for what is to come.
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To hear today’s scriptures new again, we do ourselves well to go back first.
Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament. He is a Judean prophet from what can be described as the Persian period of Hebrew history.
The people of Judah were exiled into Babylon. After about 75 years, Cyrus, the king of Persia (think modern Iran) decreed that the Hebrews could return to their homeland. Malachi speaks to people who are in the midst of a national and religious restoration. Malachi probably lived and labored during the times of Ezra and Nehemiah. Part of the context of Malachi was that it was the time of the reconstruction of the Temple.
During the Babylonian exile, the first Temple was looted and laid in ruins. It was a time of deep theological soul-searching for the people.
The most sacred part of the Temple was the room called the Holy of Holies: it was where the Ark of the Covenant was kept (the ornate box constructed to contain the remnants of the original tablets of the Ten Commandments); the High Priest only entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – to perform special rituals and offer special prayers seeking forgiveness for the people.
In this reconstructed Temple during Malachi’s time, the Ark of the Covenant was gone (likely looted by the Babylonians as implied in the non-Biblical book of 1st Esdras (1:54), although there are traditions that the Ark was secretly taken out of Jerusalem and safely ended up in Africa). Either way, the 2nd Temple’s Holy of Holies would be missing a significant holy relic.
In a tangible way, tradition held that the actual presence of God dwelled within the Holy of Holies. In fact, during the exile, the prophet Ezekiel had a vision that the spirit of God left the ruins of the Temple and promises to be with the people in Babylon (Ezekiel 11).
The prophet Malachi speaks about a messenger of God, who will prepare the people for the return of the presence of God to the reconstructed Temple: the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to [the] temple.
The messenger’s message is to be prepared for God is near and soon to be known in a new way.
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Move ahead 500 years and our faith story encounters another messenger – John, the son of a Temple priest, Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, whom the Gospel of Luke describes as an older cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus. He grew up in the Judean hills east of Jerusalem.
As an adult, John was viewed as a person with something important to say. Word spread that what he had to say was enlivening people’s faith. He preached a baptism of repentance. John set up camp near the Jordan River and invited people to repent from their sins and to turn back to God in a spirit of loving forgiveness.
The Jordan River was significant in that it is the place of entry back into the promised land in the time of Moses and Joshua. It was like going back to the beginning. Going through the waters of the Jordan would have also be the act of return for the exiles from Babylon - the ones whom Malachi was speaking to.
In a way, John’s baptism was his own version of Yom Kippur: a promise that God forgives and that the people are destined to be ‘right with God’. To go back; to restore a balance that (for any number of reasons) has been lost.
The Jordan River was significant in that it is the place of entry back into the promised land in the time of Moses and Joshua. It was like going back to the beginning. Going through the waters of the Jordan would have also be the act of return for the exiles from Babylon - the ones whom Malachi was speaking to.
In a way, John’s baptism was his own version of Yom Kippur: a promise that God forgives and that the people are destined to be ‘right with God’. To go back; to restore a balance that (for any number of reasons) has been lost.
If we had read on in Luke chapter three, we would have heard John quoted as saying 16John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
Sounds a bit familiar, eh?
John and Malachi are separated by five centuries, but they both spoke a message that God would soon be known in a new way – for the returned exiles, it would be through a renewal of Temple life, something that was only known in the stories of the elders. For John, God would be known in a tangible way through the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The author of Luke borrowed words of another ancient prophet (who was a exile contemporary of Ezekiel) to describe John when the text says... 4...The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 5Every 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; 6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
The words meant something different to the exiles than what Luke describes. To the people living as forced refugees in Babylon, the wilderness was the barrier between exile and home. The voice cries out that the impassible wilderness will be made into a highway, a straight path, for God’s people to journey home. It was figurative language but it spoke of a God who would not be barred from the people no matter what obstacles lay in the way.
For Luke, John is in calling people into the wilderness, where they would be prepared to be able to straighten out their lives as far as their faith was concerned.
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The messengers of God in these scriptures for today are inviting us to allow the Holy into our midst and to be profoundly affected by that experience.
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Can we hear that message here and now? Does it have meaning and purpose for us where our lives are right now?
Are these scriptures able to be ‘new again’ for us?
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John calls on the people to examine their lives. What garners people’s energy and focus? Where does their faith fit into the mix? John invited them to reorient their lives. The word repent (in English comes through old French from a Latin word (poenitire) that means to make sorry. In the Greek of the New Testament “metanoia” (metanoiaV) means to be beyond one’s mind or perhaps an after-understanding: we might say a ‘second thought’.
We can assume that John the Baptist spoke to the crowds in Aramaic or Hebrew. In the Old Testament, we can find two words that convey the meaning of repentance: שוב shuv (to return: cf. Malachi 2:6True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in integrity and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity.) and נחם niHam (to cause relief: cf. Isaiah 51:3For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places.)
Most often, I find this multiplicity of understandings helpful in engaging what ‘repentance’ is all about.
ÿ To return (shuv).
ÿ To re-think (metanoia).
ÿ To bring relief/comfort (naHam).
ÿ To construct sorry (poenitire): more active than simply being sorry.
So to repent is a bit of all these things ... it is a recognition that we are mistaken, that we want to make things better, so we turn around, we re-think and we do the work necessary for us to be relieved of the discomfort.
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John called the people by the Jordan to re-think the place of God in their lives.
We can hear that call as well.
It is only 16 days before Christmas. Are you ready?
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I’m curious how you heard that question: are you ready? Did you hear it as a shopping list question or a faith-mindset question?
What is in your way of being ready to welcome the Christ Child in 2012?
What does it mean to prepare the way for Jesus in 2012?
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Are you ready to repent of the selfishness and consumerism that this time of year can bread within many of us?
Can we be more concerned with a generosity of compassion than a generosity of ‘stuff’?
Are we ready to cleanse ourselves of the baggage of the festival and to honour the sacredness?
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Forgiveness is part of God’s nature. Dying and rising anew is part of our story. We can choose the path of holiness (as we sang before when the children were leaving for Sunday School).
Like Yom Kippur, re-righting ourselves on the path of faithfulness is an ongoing process – God’s love and forgiveness is steadfast and eternal, our experience of that is a choice.
From time to time, we all benefit from the prophets’ voices that call us to know God.
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Like the familiar parts of our Bible that we hear each advent and Christmas, we can know the comfort and relief of God’s loving forgiveness over and over again in our lives. And each time, the blessing is new...again.
Let us pray:
God, we turn to you to find the peace that we need. Open our ears to the calls to turn our lives back to you. Amen.
#55VU “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”
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