I have a brain teaser for you this morning: What do Eleanor Roosevelt and John the Baptist have in common? Now, there’s a stretch for you! Come on, you must all know, surely? Of course you don’t! Nor did I until I started to write this sermon. Both Eleanor Roosevelt and John the Baptist were prescient; they had a sense of an impending crisis. Eleanor Roosevelt had a meeting with Harry Truman, so the story goes, in 1945 when FDR died. Truman was about to take over the Presidency of the United States of America. Being a kind man, when he greeted the widow said what we all say to people who have lost someone, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”
Roosevelt replied, “No. Is there anything that we can do for you, for you are the one who is going to have troubles?”
She realized that the world facing Truman was a dangerous one. She knew that while her husband might have seen the United States and the world through a good portion of the Second World War, much was still to happen. When you look at what Truman had to face, the decisions about the nuclear bombing of Japan, when he had to deal with the Fair Deal, when he had to work towards the Marshall Plan, when he helped create NATO, you realize that Truman had many, many troubles coming his way. Eleanor Roosevelt knew that he was the one who needed help.
Dial back two thousand years when John the Baptist breaks on to the scene and also talks about an impending crisis and a world changing dramatically. But, he is not talking in political, economic or military terms, although as we would see there would be ramifications that would impinge upon those areas, he was talking about the breaking in to the history of the world the very presence of God incarnate in his Son. To use the literal term of the Greek world crisis, it really means a profound change, a profound challenge, a moment of decision. John the Baptist broke onto the scene to prepare the way for the One who was coming as the great King and saying, “Get ready folks for the coming of the Son of Man, the coming of the Son of God.” He wanted ready the world for the coming of the Son.
What is fascinating in the Gospel of Luke, who records this, is that he wants to give a sense of the timing of all of this. Luke was an historian, and of all the Gospels the one who was most concerned with history, because he was writing primarily for a gentile and a Roman audience who needed to understand the history of events. Luke goes to great lengths putting detail into the text. John the Baptist breaks on to the scene saying there is going to be a crisis, but when was this crisis? Well, as we see, it was around 30 AD, and we are given some details. For example, Tiberius would be the Roman Emperor, following the first great emperor, Augustus. Tiberius, we are told was in his fifteenth year, and if it was in his fifteenth year and he took over in 15 AD then is would be 30 AD. Giving us the name of Tiberius places John the Baptist in history and in time.
Luke is conscious of Jewish history too, because he talks about it being in the time of Herod the Tetrarch. Herod, who had been Herod the Great, restored much of the power of Israel, and died around 4 BC, handing over power to three of his sons. This is important. The first son was Herod Antipas, and he was given a part of the kingdom Galilee and Perea. Then, there is Herod Philip, and he had been given Iturea and Trachonitis. The third one was Herod Archelaus. He had been given Judea and Samaria. Herod Archelaus was the nastiest, meanest of Herod’s sons. What we know about them is that their reign in those respective areas was around 30 AD. Then finally to make the point of the history, there are the High Priests, who we are told are Annas and Caiaphas. They were in fact not simultaneously the High Priests, for you can only have one High Priest at any given time, but in this period Annas and Caiaphas were the High Priests during the time of John the Baptist. So, these key leaders, Tiberius, the Herods, the High Priests, all of them coexisted around the same time.
It is important for Luke to place John the Baptist alongside them, because all of them had been very amazing leaders and were well known. John the Baptist was obscure. He came from the country and probably belonged to a group of nomads and mystics, the Essenes and was hardly known outside of rural communities. Yet, John the Baptist, in the midst of all of these great leaders talks about something even more important: the coming of the Son of God. He is preparing the people for a crisis. Those who are in power and all the people who are ordinary should know and get ready; God is up to something spectacular; God is going to do something great!
A great American preacher, Bishop William Willimon says, “Do not misunderstand John the Baptist. He is not writing a Hallmark card.” There is nothing soppy or sentimental, there are no nice little flowers or cute sayings, nothing that pops out of the card that you can use as an inspirational quote on your Facebook page. This isn’t some little nicey-nice, lovey-dovey message from Hallmark, this profound words for the people, and the people must do two things. When I look at John the Baptist in context with all the troubles and turmoil of the middle of the first century, and I look at our world, I cannot help but think that getting ready for Christmas then and the arrival of Christ is the same as getting ready for Christmas now. The things that John the Baptist spoke about are as relevant today as they were then.
Here’s how you get ready for Christmas. You do it in two way: One is the baptism of repentance. John the Baptist understood that the people had to get ready for the coming of the King. Repentance simply means turning around. In other words, not doing what you are currently doing, but turning around. In repentance you turn to what it is that God wants you to do. Then he quotes from the very passage that I read from Isaiah 40. This passage is actually very real, because it is about the coming of the monarch, the coming of the king. In biblical times, when the king was on the way to your town, a courier was sent from the royal household proclaiming the king was coming. Part of the preparation – and I love this because I didn’t know about it until recently – was to make sure that the roads were nice and smooth, sort of like Toronto for the Pan Am Games, right? I have never seen the Don Valley as pristine as it was before the Pan Am Games! We will probably never see the Don Valley that smooth again. It was beautiful! Well, this is what the prophet had in mind here: Make straight the roads; make the high places low; make sure the bumpy parts are smooth. In other words, get everything ready for the coming of the monarch, because you do not want to look as if you are not prepared.
John the Baptist, in quoting Isaiah 40, knew everyone would get it. They would make the association between smooth roads and the coming of the king. For John the Baptist, the smooth road required repentance. Fixing what is broken, making sure that the rough places are made smooth. He does not spell out in concrete terms precisely what it is one should repent for; he simply says, “Repent.” Don’t be under the misapprehension that all he is being is sentimental. This isn’t about whether you feel ready for Christmas by putting a few things right to make you feel good. It is not about feeling good; it is actually about making the rough places smooth and sorting out the problems. It is not like a story I read about a man who had been owed money to Revenue Canada and who sent a cheque to them for $150. At the bottom of it he added a note that said: “If I can’t sleep, I will give you the rest.” It is not about your own sentimental feeling; it is about sorting out your life here and now and putting it right. It is about making sure that you go to the heart, to the root of things that are wrong in your life. Why? Because you want to be ready for the coming of the Son of God.
A doctor that I spoke with two or three years ago told me that people with stomach ulcers would mask their symptoms. They would take antacids, change their diets, do all sorts of things to settle it down. The problem was that they found out H.pylori is really a bacterium that is the source of a great number of stomach ulcers, and while there are other things that can still cause them like medications and stress, you have to get to that bacterium to actually make the problem go away. Trying to mask things doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. I think repentance is like that. It is not generic. It is not like you can say, “I’ve repented about everything I have ever done wrong” and never give it another thought. No, it is about going to the heart and asking God “What rough part of my life needs to be smoothed? What pot holes need to be fixed? What do I need to do to get ready for the coming of the Son of God?” I am not going to prescribe for you what your pot holes are, I am not going to suggest that I know any more than I have to take care of my own, but I do know this: John the Baptist was right. The world and its leaders needed to prepare the way for the Lord. Do that this Advent however God is calling you.
There is a second part to this that is really key is the baptism of forgiveness. One thing John the Baptist did know is that when God arrives on the scene, the agenda for the kingdom is one of forgiveness: to heal the broken, restore the lost, save those who are wandering, and forgive the sins of the people. This is the Gospel! John knew that the coming of God would be a crisis, because in a sense, forgiveness is a crisis. It takes a situation that is broken and turns it around into something else. It takes relationships that have been destroyed and it mends them. You see, repentance without forgiveness is like buying tickets to the symphony, and then when you arrive, saying all you want to hear are the percussionists and nothing else. The percussionists are great, but I don’t think a whole symphony with the percussion section alone is going to be particularly fulfilling, do you? I think that is exactly what happens when you have a faith that is based almost entirely on repentance and not enough on forgiveness.
Repentance has to put things right. It can’t be sentimental. I was thinking about that with all the events of the last few months. I am not saying anything prophetic; I am just reminding us of how sentimental repentance means nothing. Sentimental repentance is saying, “Our prayers go out to the victims and our thoughts go out to the people who are suffering, but we are not even going to try to do anything about it.” That I think is a shallow repentance. The underside of this is a radical sense of forgiveness, and for John the Baptist this sense of forgiveness is what would distinguish the kingdom of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. It is the power of forgiveness that would bring the peace that we celebrated this morning in the light of the candle. It would bring peace between us and others with whom there is enmity. It would bring peace in the relationship with God Almighty, God’s holiness and our brokenness and sinfulness. Forgiveness is the key!
Over the years I have seen two types of forgiveness. The very radical and transformative. One of them is when you yourself have been wronged. I read some time ago about the very famous British nurse, Edith Cavell. She was one of the great nurses in World War I. She was with troops behind enemy lines in Belgium. Cavell was eventually arrested and convicted of subterfuge and sentenced to execution. She insisted that she was only a nurse, healing people who had been wounded but she was seen as a spy undermining the enemy. Right before her execution before a firing squad, Cavell is reputed to have said these words: “I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” John the Baptist would have been standing alongside her before the firing squad saying, “You tell them, Sister!” John the Baptist was beheaded himself for exactly the same sentiments.
It can be even closer to our reality that that. A few years ago, I had the privilege of meeting the Reverend Dale Lang. We have sort of forgotten about him in the last ten or fifteen years as time has gone along, but Dale Lang was an Anglican minister. His son was killed in Taber, Alberta, in 1999. Do you remember Columbine? And then, there were similar shootings in Taber, Alberta. His son, Jason Lang, a fourteen-year-old boy was one of the victims of that school shooting. Lang came out right away after this happened and made absolutely amazing statements. In one of them, he said the following, and this is absolutely inspiring particularly now: “As someone who has been a follower of Jesus Christ for twenty-two years, forgiveness was the only response that I could give. I didn’t think about it. My wife and I didn’t sit down and talk about it. It was a response out of our faith. We did it because it is the way we understood who Jesus is. It had a significant impact on the people in the country. I can’t explain it, except to say that people are not used to the word ‘forgiveness’”.
John the Baptist was radical. It was not a Hallmark moment! He breaks onto the scene and says, “Repent and forgive!” If you want to prepare yourselves for the coming of the true king, the true Prince of Peace, the true Forgiver and Redeemer of the lost and the broken, then make sure you straighten out the rough patches of your life, but also experience the power of forgiveness. This is never more needed than now! Amen.