Second Sunday of Advent/Communion December 6, 2009 “Be Prepared” Reverend Michael D. Powell Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 3:1-6

Today is December 6th, and there are just 19 more days before Christmas, the day on which we celebrate a rebirth of God’s love, joy and wonder in the world. Are you ready? There is so much to do - so many decisions to make, presents to purchase, people to see and places to be. There are so many things we’re in charge of in order to help make that rebirth of love, joy and wonder happen for our friends and families. It can be a bit overwhelming, can’t it?

And then we hear the message of John the Baptist, “Ready or not, here he comes,” and we know in our hearts that he’s not talking about shopping days. John is the one who has been sent as kind of an early warning system, to help us get prepared. John is the messenger, and his message had been anticipated for over 400 years, during the period between the Old and the New Testament.

But in order to understand John the Baptist, the first prophet of the New Testament, we have to go back to Malachi, who was the last prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament. The name Malachi means messenger, and in chapter 3, verses 1 through 4, he announced the coming Day of the Lord. He warned that it’s going to come like a blast furnace, like a refiner’s fire that will burn away the chaff. “Who can endure the Day of the Lord’s coming?” he asks. But God, as an act of pure grace, sends a messenger ahead in order to prepare the people. Because of the early warning of the messenger, the people have an opportunity to prepare, to do whatever’s necessary to get their lives in order. What needs to happen in your life for you, personally, to be ready to experience a rebirth of love, of joy and wonder?

We also hear of this coming messenger in Isaiah 40, verse 3, where we read that the messenger comes as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” The words are so important that Luke quotes them again in his gospel, identifying that voice in the wilderness as John the Baptist. God has a longstanding tradition of coming to us in the wilderness times of our lives, and that’s Good News! It was in the wilderness that the people of Israel first became aware that God was leading them. It was in the wilderness that they learned to obey and to follow. It was in the wilderness that they learned who and whose they were, and became a covenant people. And finally, when the time was right, God led them out of the wilderness. God is still coming, still leading, and still rescuing us from the wilderness, even today, even this morning! I’m using the term wilderness, of course, in the broadest sense of the word. There is an emotional and a spiritual wilderness, just as there is a financial, domestic/relational, and a physical wilderness.

But, sticking to the physical for just a moment, the wilderness of Judea makes the scenic wilderness reserves of the Pacific Northwest look positively idyllic and romantic. Nobody had to protect the wilderness of Judea from developers and road builders. It looks today exactly as it did 2000, even 10,000 years ago. It is dry, arid, lonely and inhospitable. The only people who lived there were mystics and revolutionaries. Josephus, the Jewish historian, notes that there were zealots, bands of ultra nationalistic guerrilla freedom fighters who trained in the wilderness, preparing to overthrow Rome. The mystics living in the wilderness were also seeking a revolution, a revolution of the human spirit.

Even today you can visit the Qumran area, high above the Dead Sea in the Judean wilderness, where a radical Jewish sect known as Essenes lived an ascetic lifestyle. You can still see where they ritualistically purified themselves by bathing in specially designed baptismal fonts. You can see the ruins of the library where they spent long hours huddled over their study of God, meticulously copying down their holy scriptures. And you can see, high up on the side of the mountain, those awesome caves where they hid their sacred scrolls, preserving them for posterity. Such was the wilderness area where the Word of God came to John, anointing him as a messenger, to prepare the way of the Lord.

John was not a particularly sophisticated preacher. He didn’t preach finely crafted, three point sermons. He was kind of a Johnny One Note! He had just one, one-point sermon that he repeated over and over: “Repent!” It’s the word metanoia. Metanoia is often described as a turning around, a changing of direction. Meta means change, and noia means mind, so that metanoia, means to change your mind. But meta also means after, and noia means thought, so that repentance is an afterthought, a re-thinking after reflection on new information. Isn’t that usually what changes our mind? The new information that John preaches has to do with who’s in charge, and how we find our way out of the wilderness. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has to do with learning to follow God’s lead.

There are different ways of thinking. Or, some might say, of not thinking! Our rational, logical way of thinking is offset by a more intuitive way of “thinking,” or receiving information. Some refer to our intuitive thoughts as inspiration, as being “in the spirit” or spirit-led! Now, to be fair, it is primarily due to our ability to think logically and rationally that we in the West are such successful builders and developers, scientists and engineers. There’s a lot to be said for logic and rational thought.

Unfortunately, this tremendously powerful skill for rational thought can also lead us into another kind of wilderness, that of chaos, worry and confusion. Here’s an example: who among us has not thought and thought and thought about a problem until you experienced an endless loop of confusion? And yet, there is a way out. In our more intuitive way of thinking, or not thinking, we sometimes just give up, relax, go do something else, think about something else, and suddenly the answer comes, without any effort of our own. This, in a word, is repentance. We’ve turned around, changed our way of thinking, and it leads to powerful new insights. What we have surrendered is deliberate, rational, conscious control. What we have experienced is inspiration, the spirit leading us out of the wilderness.

This morning is the Second Sunday of Advent, just 19 days before we celebrate the birth of God’s love in human flesh. Are you ready? Are you prepared? Are you feeling inspired and spirit-led, or are you feeling a little overwhelmed, lost in the wilderness of things to do, people to see and places to be? The message of John is to repent! Relax, and surrender control. You’re not really in charge of making sure it all happens anyway. The Word of the Lord is that, in the fullness of time, God sent his Son, and is sending him still, into your life and mine. The Word of the Lord is, be prepared to follow. You’ll be glad you did!

The way for us to prepare is to simply receive the gift of his loving presence as it is presented to us, and one of the most beautiful ways we receive that gift is when we celebrate God’s love by remembering that you and I together are the living Body of Christ. We remember that whenever we share in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Thanks be to God. Amen.