A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Second Sunday in Advent/C • December 8, 2024

Luke 3:1-6

Mise en place. Unless like me, you’re fascinated by French cooking videos on YouTube, Mise en place may not be a familiar phrase. It’s a French that translates roughly, ‘Preparation’. It means before you set out to make something, getting all the ingredients ready and at hand. For example, I make Hollandaise sauce at home. It’s a fussy sauce, prone to falling apart if you don’t attend to it. So before I start, I separate two eggs and put them in a little bowl. I slice a butter quarter into bits and put the bits on two separate little plates. I zest two lemons and then squeeze the juice into a cup. Only when all the preparation is complete do I start actually cooking. It makes a lot of dishes—but when the ingredients are combined and heated and the critical moment occurs and the sauce thickens, I’m not looking for something I forgot. Mise en place: preparation. Today’s reading calls us to a spiritual mise en place, spiritual preparation, and advent is the time to get ready.

One of the most important steps in preparation is clearing the space. This past week at our house, before the Christmas decorations were brought up, before Jacquelyn did the amazing transformation she oversees each year, we had to put things away. The light on the table behind the sofa by the window: gone! The lamps that sit against the wall: moved. The sofa had to be moved to make space for the Christmas tree. We don’t have a lot of electrical plugs, so things had to be unplugged to make space. All this is mise en place, all this is preparation. All this is before the decorations appear. And there is a moment, just a moment, when the space is bare, almost back to the emptiness of when we first arrived.

Luke wants to summon us to just such a moment with Jesus. Mark starts with John the Baptist and Matthew hurries past a genealogy and the story about the wise ones. But Luke has already told us about the special birth of John. The long call to worship we read this morning is John’s father’s song about his son coming into the world; we’ve already heard this when we get to hearing about his ministry. Luke is preparing us; Luke is getting ready, getting there slowly but surely, and we’re invited along.

Luke starts with the particulars. Folk tales start, “Once upon a time…”. Luke is using the dating conventions of his time. We talk about, “AD, BC”; scholars now use “CE” for Common Era to mark the same thing. People in Luke’s time used the reign of rulers to set dates. We do the same, don’t we? In our house, we have “before we were married,” “When we lived in Norwich”, “the year we got that huge snow storm in Owosso”. Luke is using events but honestly, Luke’s dates don’t quite match up. They roughly put us in what we would call about 27 AD. Tiberius is emperor; Herod Antipas is governing Judah. Pontius Pilate is the Roman procurator, something like governor, of Palestine. 

There is a lesson behind Luke’s careful dating. He wants us to see the particularity of God. God always acts in a particular place, a particular time, a particular person or people. “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?,” the Psalmist asks, and the answer is always someone’s name, some particular person who lives in a time, who lives in a place. Luke asks us to see John as a real person, as real as any of us. He’s inviting us to see that God is acting in all of history though this particular man in this particular time. What God does is to call him to preach a message of repentance. Next week we’ll hear more of what he preaches but for now, we’re offered two parts. One is that he’s calling people, including us, to prepare for God’s coming. The second is that he’s offering a baptism of repentance.

This is the portion from Isaiah.

Straight paths, valleys and mountains made level—this is the language of road building. Have you seen this? In 1971, I drove across the country to my first church, the Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church in Idaho. Interstate 90 wasn’t complete yet. Every so often, I’d have to detour off the highway, drive past the bulldozers and work crews building the next section. The most spectacular part was in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. There, they were taking the zigzagging rising road and straightening it, filling valleys, literally making crooked places straight.

Isaiah may not know about Interstate 90, but he does know about road building. He lived in the time of Babylon and every year Babylon had a big New Years festival. The climax of the festival was the king dressed up like the god Marduk being pulled on a huge parade float into the city. But before that could be done, thousands of slaves would be sent out beyond the city gates to make the road smooth, fill in low places that had washed out, cut down hills. Curves would have to be changed into straight sections. This is what Isaiah is imagining: making a way for God to come to us. 

Our culture emphasizes what we do, and we’ve let that leak over into our spiritual lives. So we hear a lot about “coming to Jesus”. But the testimony of scripture over and over again is that it is not we who come to God; it is God who comes to us. What we can do is to prepare the way for God to come, make the path straight and easy. 

We do that the way we prepare for anything. Mise en place: get things ready. Every Sunday, we all receive a bulletin here that Linda carefully, thoughtfully prepares. Take it home. You heard the scripture in a few minutes, but a great discipline is to take that bulletin, make it a devotional guide for the week. Read the scripture readings again, you will have my thoughts; consider your own. How does it make you feel? What questions does it ask? What does it ask you to do? Read a little before, a little after the reading. Scripture is particular: every reading is new. I’ve been a lectionary preacher over 40 years. The lectionary is a three-year cycle of readings, so I’ve been through the whole cycle more than a dozen times. Yet every week when I start to prepare to talk with you, I read the scripture for that week fresh, I find fresh things in it. Because the reading is not just words, it is the mix of the words with this particular moment.

Preparing takes some space. Perhaps the hardest spiritual discipline of all for me is just that, making space, doing nothing. I don’t know about you, but if I sit down for am minute with nothing going on my mind starts to fill up with all the things I should be up doing. I have to consciously push them aside for prayer time. Yet isn’t that precisely what John is asking? “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Make a moment; listen. Once again, our culture misleads us. We think of prayer as something we say. And God surely wants to hear what we want to say, God surely wants to hear our particular fears, our particular hopes, our concern for others. But real conversations aren’t just what we say, they are what we hear as well. What if we just listened?

The second thing we learn about John in this reading is that he’s preaching a baptism of repentance. Now repentance means changing your direction. When you’re lost, it’s easy to keep getting even more lost; it’s hard to stop and ask for help. But that’s what John is preaching. 

Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. Eighty-three years ago, people just like us sat here. I’m sure some worried about the war in Europe, some were anxious to get on to Christmas, they had all the daily hopes and fears we all have. I imagine the pastor preached a good sermon that day, they sang some great hymns, perhaps hymns we still sing. They left church, went home, and heard on the radio the terrible news of Pearl Harbor. Nothing had prepared them for that. In that moment, everyone’s life changed.

Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. We can, however, prepare for God to come to us and when God is with us, those events will not crush us or overwhelm us. “Mise en place”: prepare the way of the Lord, as carefully as we would prepare to make something wonderful on the stove. The gift of advent is time to get ready. The gift of advent is time to prepare. The gift of advent is to make straight God’s path to your heart.

Amen.