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December 10, 2006,  Advent Two, All Souls' Episcopal Church 

The Word of God came unto John.

      In ancient texts, when an author wished to place events within a particular historical setting he most likely use the reign of a well known king and other office holders to mark the time and place. For example, my biography might begin this way: In the fifth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second, and the twelfth year of the reign of Coach Wilkinson of Oklahoma, when Diefenbaker was Prime Minister of Canada, during the second term of the Eisenhower administration, in the year that Elvis Presley was inducted into the United States Army, and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” won Best Picture at the Oscars, on the day the U. S. satellite Explorer 1 was launched, Dale Petley was born.  Our Gospel reading begins in a similar way.

      That St. Luke uses such a literary device is significant. He is making the point that eternal things were revealed to us in a specific historical setting. He is telling us how the timeless truth of God came to us in time – the fullness of time. And he is doing more than that. He is writing about how the eternal Word of God was made flesh and dwelt among us. This is what we call the Incarnation. The Word of God came to John the Baptist in the wilderness. That Word inspired John to preach his message of repentance. We are also told that the eternal Word of God came to John in the wilderness and spoke with him face to face, and that he was called Jesus of Nazareth.

      The very particularity of the Christian revelation requires on our part the gift of faith. We believe that the Word of God came to us and lived among us. He taught us by words and actions. His teachings and his accomplishments for us and for our salvation is what the church calls the deposit of faith. We must ever remain faithful to that revelation. We have no authority to alter it and we must not corrupt it. We must faithfully hand it on from generation to generation if we are to be the Body of Christ. Some would call this attitude “traditionalist.” Some would call it “conservative.” We call it faithful.

       We are told that John preached in the wilderness. He was not like the prophet Jonah preaching to the people of Nineveh, proclaiming his message for all to hear in the midst of their busy preoccupations. No, John was a voice crying in the wilderness. Those who wished to hear him had to travel to the wilderness to do so. Hearing John required on the part of his listeners a pilgrimage of sorts. They had to leave their places of comfort and stop whatever they were doing in order to come to where he was. Our Lord Jesus called John the Baptist the greatest of all those born of women. Perhaps this is so because John received the Word of God in a sense as an Old Testament prophet only to see that Word in the flesh and fulfilled with his very eyes. He saw the Old Testament fulfilled in the New. We are even told that John leapt in the womb in the very presence of this fulfillment.

       In the scriptures, the wilderness was a place of clarity and of new beginnings. Our Lord Jesus fasted and prayed for forty days in the wilderness just as Moses, the Lawgiver, and Elijah, the Prophet had done centuries before. The wilderness taught God’s ancient people a sense of complete dependency upon God. In the Bible, the wilderness was an actual place, but sometimes we can find ourselves in a metaphorical wilderness as well. The experience of sudden loss can be a sort of wilderness – the loss of a job, the loss of our health, and the loss of a loved one can remove us from what we knew as a stable and predictable life and place us in an emotional wilderness where we struggle simply to survive. We can learn a dependency upon God in such places. Hitting bottom in a wilderness of addiction or the shadowy valley of depression can also be that place where we learn to have a similar dependence upon God and the goodness of his grace. The wilderness was for the People of Israel that place where they rediscovered their identity as the chosen ones of God. It was where they formulated the vision of who and what they were. It was where they were given the law and where the sifting and testing took place so that they could become a people worthy of inheriting the land of promise. John the Baptist chose the wilderness as the location of his preaching ministry because he knew that humanity was about to embark upon a new beginning – the inauguration of a new spiritual kingdom. In the Season of Advent, we look for the fulfillment of that Kingdom at the end of human history. We begin a new church year with a moment of great clarity, refocusing upon the fact that Christ the Lord is King and that he shall return to judge the quick and the dead.

       John the Baptist was not the first to proclaim the beginning of Christ’s Kingdom. The first public proclamation of that kingdom came to lowly shepherds on a cold night outside Bethlehem. The proclamation was announced by God’s own messengers, the angels of Heaven who told those shepherds: “To you is born this day in the city of David, a savior, who is Christ, the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” That new beginning took place in the most familiar and lowliest of settings. It began with the message of an angel responded to by the pure heart and faithful acceptance of a young Jewish maiden. It came upon a midnight clear ushered in by the cry of a tiny baby surrounded by the love of humble parents.

       In this Advent Season, I pray that the new church year might be for all of us a time for clarity and of new beginnings. I pray that we all will be faithful to the Word of God proclaimed to ancient prophets and scribes and made flesh in Christ our Lord. I pray that the Kingdom of God in Christ may continue to find place in our hearts and that we may live as citizens of that Kingdom now and forevermore.

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