Category Archives: Luke

All Washed Up

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2025

Baptism of the Lord Sunday/C • January 12, 2025

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

“How have I ever deserved such love?” A woman asks this question near the end of a movie called The Danish Girl and I wonder if it is Jesus’ question at his baptism.

 I imagine it as a hot day; this is desert country after all. The stories about John tell us there were crowds but what’s a crowd? Twenty people? A couple hundred? Thousands? We don’t know. John is a striking figure, a charismatic man filled with the Spirit of God, who speaks a fierce message, calling people to repentance. He’s on the shore of the Jordan River. This is the river that had to be crossed centuries before by God’s people to enter the promised land. This is the water that had to be waded, this is the stream that stood between them and the fulfillment in history of God’s love and covenant. Is there a line to be baptized? Did Jesus stand behind others as one after another they came to John, talked to John, heard him pray and then felt him forcefully plunge them into the water, let the water cover them like someone drowning, and then lift them up, wet, wondering what comes next, clean, ready for the next chapter? Now Jesus comes; now he looks at John, now their eyes make a private space only they understand. Now John is taking Jesus in his arms, as he has with all the others, now Jesus is plunged into the water, there is perhaps that instant of fear so instinctive when we are underwater, now he is lifted up and heaven opens, Jesus hears what we all want to hear, “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is baptism.

Baptism is rare here and in church life, we’ve become fussy about the rituals that surround it. We have considerable evidence for baptism, both of children and adults, in the early church. The Didache, a collection of sayings and teachings probably written about the same time as the New Testament says this about baptism.

Concerning baptism, you should baptize this way: After first explaining all things, baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in flowing water. But if you have no running water, baptize in other water; and if you cannot do so in cold water, then in warm. If you have very little, pour water three times on the head in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Before the baptism, both the baptizer and the candidate for baptism, plus any others who can, should fast. The candidate should fast for one or two days beforehand.

This is great news if you’re one of those people who think details aren’t important; bad news if you’re a ritual maker. What it says is that the form of applying the water, the part that most interests us, doesn’t really matter. Use running water—if you’ve got it. Use a few drops if that’s all you’ve got. 

But if the details don’t matter, what does? The clues are in the scripture we read this morning and they have nothing to do with measuring out water. Isaiah says, 

But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. [Isaiah 43:1-7]

This word is addressed to people who feel themselves lost. Every day the news shows us pictures of refugees from Gaza and other places. Israel had become refugees and this is God saying, “You’re not forgotten: you’re still mine.” There’s a reason every baptism begins with a question: “What name is given this child?” We name a person at baptism in a way that honors them uniquely but also connects them with a family, a heritage. Whose are you? You are God’s own child, regardless of your age. Baptism is a reminder we’re not on our own; we belong and we belong to someone, to God. In the visible church, here, we are meant to be the emblem of that belonging. Baptism is first, then belonging.

But it’s also a response to fear. Swimming is taught to children these days and we forget that for most of history and still today in many places, people fear water. Water is dangerous. Once my son was teasing me about not playing sports; he talked about having the courage to go out on the soccer field, knowing he might get bruised. I pointed out that I sailed and commented, “Every year, some sailors die when they drown.” It was a poor joke yet it had a truth: water is dangerous. Baptism began as a way of making sacred what we feared. In John Irving’s novel, The World According to Garp, a family retreats to a home on the ocean shore in New Hampshire. There’s a beach and the children are warned about an undertow that can suck them down. Misunderstanding, the way children do, they call it “the undertoad”. I know about the undertoad. Once, long ago, I was on a beach in New Jersey, swimming while my parents watched a few yards away. The undertow—the undertoad!—caught me, swirled me around and I’ve never forgotten the fear of that moment. “When you pass the waters,” God says, “I will be with you”. When the undertoad grabs you, you will still be God’s.

But it’s not all water; baptism is more than being washed up and set down fresh and fancy. Acts tells the story of an early church mission. Someone has gone up to Samaria and baptized some folks there. They didn’t ask the Consistory, they didn’t follow the ritual, they just went ahead and did it. But somehow, the baptism wasn’t effective and the disciples know this because there has been no evidence of the Holy Spirit among these folks. We don’t know what this means; we only have this little testimony. Yet clearly the early church knew that baptism wasn’t simply a human act of applying water; it had a deeper, transforming significance. Today, baptism has become about the water; God meant it to be about the Spirit, the breath, the wind that blows through life. In the beginning, Genesis says, the Spirit of God blew on the face of the waters and it’s from this ordering that creation follows. Baptism is meant to be a sign of a deeper spiritual blowing in us that causes us to live out the gentle, loving, forgiving way of Jesus. No amount of water can do that; it takes the Holy Spirit. Our task as baptized Christians is to nurture the presence and experience of that Spirit in those who come here, those God sends.

The final clue I want to call attention to this morning is simple and direct. At the end of the account of Jesus’ baptism, it says, “heaven opened”. We live in a world caught up in the details of earthly life: what to wear, eat, how to get through the day. What we miss if we forget our baptism is that heaven is open; God is calling. The question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?” has a simple answer: you don’t, you can’t. We don’t deserve love: it is pure gift, the gift of the God to whom we belong, whose children we are. If we believe we are indeed, God’s people, if God has given us the Spirit to bind us and energize us in living out love, if we know heaven is open to us, then indeed, we are loved in a way beyond deserving. You are my beloved, God says to Jesus: you are my beloved, God says to you.

The movie I mentioned earlier, The Danish Girl, is a fictionalized account of a real person, a man named Einar Wegener, married to Gerda, who discovered within himself a female identity he named Lili. It was a time and place with little understanding about such things the word ‘Transgender’ hadn’t even been invented and as Lili emerged and his life became living as Lili, as Einar receded and this woman became fully alive, he faced the conflict of being a woman living in a man’s body. At first treating this as a problem to be solved, Lili and Gerda struggled to find a way forward. Ultimately, Lili became the first person known to have undergone a series of operations to remake the body to match the identity as a woman. What’s clear from the real history, not as clear in the movie, is that there were years during which Lili faced the conflict of hiding her real self, living in shame, keeping the secret. Finally, near the end of the moveie, Lili sees how loved she is, asks the question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?”, and answers it in the only way it can be answered. “Last night I had the most beautiful dream…I dreamed I was a baby in my mother’s arms…and she looked down at me…and called me Lili.”

The dream is being called by your true name: known in your true self. And loved. Like the mother in the dream, like our father in heaven, God is calling out to us, loving us, loving us beyond anything we can or ever will deserve. In the moment we see this, in the moment we know this, heaven does indeed open. And that is baptism. 

Amen.

Leaping Love

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Fourth Sunday in Advent/C • December 22, 2024

Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-55

Ever since Thanksgiving, and even before in some cases, in stores, in media, in daily life, we’ve been bombarded with Christmas. Our culture encourages a season of frenzied spending and parties, of decorations we buy and hang to show the Christmas Spirit. But where is that Spirit? Our Lectionary, the guide to scriptures we hear each Sunday, has taken a different tack. This whole Advent season, we’ve been asked to look not to Bethlehem, not to the stable but to other events. We began with the end: Jesus coming in power, and the heartfelt command to be alert, to watch and listen for Jesus appearance. The last two Sundays we heard about John the Baptist whose testimony is that one more powerful is coming. Finally, today, the last Sunday in Advent, we hear this story on the eve of Jesus’ birth.

A Strange Story

It’s a strange story, isn’t it? Luke doesn’t begin his gospel with Jesus; he begins with the parents of John, his father, Zechariah. Zechariah is a priest and during a service in the temple, the angel Gabriel appears and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to have a son. Zechariah doesn’t believe him because Elizabeth is too old. So Gabriel tells him he will be mute until his son is born. Never mess with an angel! So today we don’t hear from Zechariah; we hear from Elizabeth. She is, indeed, pregnant; she’s had her own inspiration, and now she’s about to bear a child who will be known later as John the Baptist. There’s no statue for Elizabeth in nativity scenes but let’s pretend there is and set her aside for a moment while we talk about the other person in this story: Mary. 

Now if you were Roman Catholic, you’d have heard all about Mary. But what you would have heard is about Mary characterized as the mother of Jesus, not this Mary, not this young unmarried woman. There are endless theological debates about Mary in which the word ‘virgin’ figures prominently. Most of those debates are in Greek and none of them tell us about the reality of someone we would call a girl. Most Biblical scholars suggest Mary would have been about 14. That’s very young in our culture; it was common in hers. What is shocking is that she is pregnant without being married. Girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were often shamed, sometimes stoned.

Mary’s Story

So we have this story that becomes stranger the more we listen to it. Mary has had her own angelic visitation; you’ll have to come back another time to hear that. Already engaged to Joseph, the angel tells her she will become pregnant with one who will become king, one who will reign in David’s line. She’s from Nazareth, up in the north; now she’s made the hundred-mile journey to Judah, to see someone who may be an aunt or a cousin, Elizabeth. These are two pregnant women who have no business being pregnant: one is too old, one is too young. There are no men in the conversation; this is women’s business. And at the moment they meet, something happens only a woman would understand: the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps.

This is the second time in the last few weeks when I feel totally unable to speak to a Biblical story. What does a man know about a baby in the womb moving? Nothing, not a thing. So I did what I did last time, I asked Jacquelyn about it. She said, “Well, May didn’t move around much; mostly she hiccuped.” I tried to imagine what that would be like, having someone hiccup inside you. It sounds awful. I mean, what do you do? You can’t feed them sugar, you can’t scare them, you can’t do anything but just wait, I guess. The one time she remembered May moving sharply was at a baseball game when some unthinking guy holding a beer, didn’t see her belly, tried to go past her and accidentally punched her belly. “May punched back,” she said. So, a word of caution; May isn’t here often, but if she is, don’t punch her, she punches back.

The reading goes on with two songs of praise, one from each woman. But I want to come back to this meeting. Luke—who, like me, is a guy, and therefore really doesn’t know anything about babies leaping in a womb—is the only place that tells this story. But we do have a story in Matthew about the same general time. Matthew tells us, 

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.
Matt. 1:18f

Joseph is usually described as a carpenter but the word translated ‘carpenter’ actually isn’t about someone who does what we think of as carpentry. It’s a person who makes tools out of wood: Joseph is a toolmaker.

Looking for Safety

So this is the story when we put it together. An angel visits a young girl, Mary, tells her she’s going to become pregnant. She’s already engaged; maybe she’s in love in that can’t stop thinking about him crushy way 14-year-old girls have. The Holy Spirit overwhelms her; she’s pregnant. Joseph knows the baby isn’t his. Honestly? Nazareth is a small place, if you know anything about small towns, you know they don’t keep secrets well. Joseph is planning to end the engagement; while he thinks about this, Mary leaves town, goes to visit her cousin or aunt Elizabeth. It’s a long way to go, a hundred miles, perhaps. Remember that the main way you get places in that time is you walk. What makes a young, pregnant girl walk a hundred miles? I can only think of one thing: she’s scared, and she’s looking for a safe place.

That’s what she finds with Elizabeth; that’s what that leaping baby in Elizabeth’s womb means. Maybe Mary still doesn’t quite believe the angel sent to her; maybe she’s already felt too many stares and heard too many questions. Maybe she’s figured out what’s going on with Joseph. But when she meets Elizabeth, when Elizabeth tells her own story, when Elizabeth’s baby leaps recognizing the special significance of Mary’s baby, she’s already safe. 

So we have these two stories of praise from two women who aren’t supposed to be having babies but are, who aren’t the sort of people we think of as especially blessed, but are. The rabbis who teach the history of God’s grace in Israel are all male but here it’s two women who say in the most profound way possible that God’s love is still active, still present, still making things happen in the world. 

Elizabeth speaks of the Mary’s baby as a fulfillment of the angelic message. Mary says, 

[God] has come to the aid his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever. [Luke 1:54f]

She also connects this aid to God’s special love for the poor, the weak, the powerless. Leaping love is for all, but it begins with loving those who need it most.

What about us?

What about us? What does this kind of love that leaps when Jesus is near mean in our lives? There is a big temptation here for me as a preacher. I want to suggest some specific thing to do.
I want to endorse some mission. I want to tell a story of some other church, some other time, some other people who leapt at a chance to express God’s love and helped someone or some people feel safer, fed them so they were less hungry, cared for them in a way that transformed their lives. 

But those are other people, other times, other places. So I’m going to simply leave the story here with you. Mary went to Elizabeth, seeking safety, and found it. When did you feel safe? How did that feel? When have you helped someone feel safe? When can you do it again? How can we do it together as a church? We have this sign: “A small church with a big message”. Isn’t that the message?—that here, you are safe in the arms of love, God’s love. In Reformed Churches, we don’t use the word ‘sanctuary’ much. But perhaps we should. Because that’s what this place is meant to be: a sanctuary of safety, where all are reminded we are children of God together. If you want to feel that leaping love, you don’t have to be pregnant with a child: we are all pregnant with possibility. May we turn that possibility into the reality of helping people find safety here.

Amen.

A Particular Joy

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Third Sunday in Advent • December 15, 2024

Luke 3:7-18 

This week winter came roaring into our area and whatever fantastic, private hopes we had that the weather would stay mild vanished with a blast of arctic wind. Isn’t it often the same in life? We roll along through the pleasant seasons until we are surprised by the onset of a winter of bleakness. The world goes cold; everything is difficult. When the cold is a matter of weather, we get out hats and gloves and heavy coat; when the cold is inside, when souls turn gray, we look for something to light the fire again. Last week we heard the story of John the Baptist’s message of repentance. Today we hear the specifics and this strange final note: “…he proclaimed the good news to the people.” [Luke 3:18]. Is John’s message good news? Is it joyful news? 

Luke is writing about people 80 years before, when Jesus was born, but he is writing for people near the end of the first century, people shivering in a spiritual winter, wondering how to find the way forward, perplexed about their purpose. The great shining promise that animated the very first Christians, that Jesus would return before they died, any day, any hour, had worn off in time passed and in the passing of the first generation. How to live in the meantime?—that is the great question they face. How to live in the meantime?—how to put into practice every day the teachings of Jesus? They live in a time of change, a time when many are being persecuted for their faith, many are in conflict with family members. Old institutions are collapsing; new ones are strange. In that sense, it is not so different from now.

John the Baptist: See Him

So Luke has reached into the great tradition of stories in the church and lifted up this story about John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus ministry. There is John, Luke tells us: see him?–a wild, strange figure on the banks of the Jordan, the river Israel had to cross to come into the promised land. He looks and smells like the desert: camel hair garments, wild honey and roast locusts for food. He preaches repentance as the right response to the time: spiritual change that leads to behavioral change, doing new things as a way to experience a new spirit. 

It’s not a general message. He gets specific in a way preachers are always reluctant to do. Details always get you in trouble. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none.” Wow. Ouch. The thing is, I have more than two coats, I have coats for different purposes. I have blue blazers, the uniform of small town business and professional guys; I have a black leather jacket that lets me look cool and stay warm in the spring and fall. I have a blue down winter coat and a heavier beige one. Three suit coats, a couple of jackets. It’s no wonder a lot of preachers stick to pointing their fingers at people who do things they don’t; here I am having to deal not with your sins but with me. Ouch. “Whoever has food must do likewise.” Well, there, that’s a little easier, we give to food pantries. I can manage that one, I think. Could we just slide by the coats? Tax collectors in the period were famous for extracting outrageous interest; soldiers often demanded protection money. “What should we do?”, they ask. John tells them not to collect exorbitant fees and tells the soldiers not to demand protection money. That must have hurt, they depend on that money. I’d much rather talk about how they should behave better than about the coats. I don’t take bribes like the tax collectors; I certainly don’t get protection money. Thank God he didn’t mention wedding fees. What John seems to have in mind is devoting the details of life to God, letting God use the details to change us.

The Story of a Coat

So let me tell you the story of one of my coats. Jacquelyn and I were pretty newly married, and she was starting the long, long process of making me more presentable. I had a faded red jacket I loved; it had an under coat that made it warm, and it had endless pockets. I don’t know how women live without pockets; I can’t get enough of them. So Jacquelyn got me a new coat. It was blue and gold, had a down lining, came down to mid-thigh, and it had some pockets though not as many as the red coat. Plus, there was a problem. You see, where I come from in Michigan, there are two tribes: the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. MSU is where I went to college and our colors are green and white. No one from MSU would ever wear blue and gold because those are the University of Michigan colors. But here was this new wife and this new coat, and even if it was blue and gold, what could I do? I wore it. 

I never quite got over the embarrassment of the colors, but I liked being warm. And that coat just lasted and lasted. Eventually the zipper pull broke off and I had to use a paper clip. Every spring it would go away; every winter it would come out. One day, a slim woman showed up at our church with nothing but a suitcase. It was snowing outside and freezing, and she had no coat. We ended up taking her home; turned out she was a refugee from Eritrea who had been bought as a wife and escaped her husband. Jacquelyn gave her a coat and some other things, and it dawned on her that there were others who were shivering. So she put a basket in the church basement and asked people to give coats for those who didn’t have any. By then the blue and gold coat had been around long enough to be a candidate for this, but I really didn’t want to give it up. This new mission hadn’t gone through the Deacons, so there was some grumbling about it; I felt like I should set an example. So one day I made a more permanent fix to the zipper and put it in the basket. Others added their coats; we took them to a place that helped refugees. There weren’t many the first year, but the next year there were more. The year we left that church, the coats had become a tradition; over a hundred were donated that year. I’ve been gone from there four years and they’re still collecting coats. People are still getting warm because of what those people do. Sometimes I smile and think somewhere, someone is still keeping warm in that blue and gold coat. I’ve had lots of coats; that’s the only one we ever talk about. That one turned out to be a real joy.

Will giving a coat away or passing out food save the world? Of course not. But then, John says, we’re not expected to save the world. The people who heard him wondered about world saving too: “…all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah…” That’s not my job, John replies; God is sending someone much more powerful to do that, and so he did, and so he does, and so he will. What’s the point of all this food and coat distribution then? It is to give us a path, a way to change ourselves so that we look more like Christ. 

The True Appearance of Christ

For the true appearance of Christ isn’t that long haired, blue-eyed picture hung on the walls of so many Sunday Schools; the true appearance of Christ is the joyful gift giver, hope giver, peace bringer who will shortly appear right there at the Jordan among these people who are busy changing their direction. Just as we reshape our bodies by going to the gym, we reshape our spirits when we change our lives this way. And when we do, we discover the fierce joy of walking God’s path.

Walking God’s path isn’t abiding by some general rules, really. It’s always particular. It’s always some act in some moment. The Roman Catholic Church has a saint who was a Mohawk Native American and converted to Christianity. Her name was Kateri. She had smallpox as a child and it left her blind so she got renamed Takewitha: person who bumps into things. So she called Saint Kateri Takewitha. I love that image because it’s just how we run into God: we bump into God without intending to. John said, “Repent”, but the repentance was particular, individual. This week, sometime, somewhere, you’re going to bump into something where you can choose to act out your part as the body of Christ. It may to be comfortable, it may not be what you normally do, but there it will be: you’re chance in some particular moment, to be kinder, to give more, to live out your faith. When you do, if you do, there will be a little more light in the world, a Christmas light, a joyful light.

Christmas Joy

There is joy waiting for Christmas; there is joy shining in the Christmas lights. It is the joy of making God’s purpose our own; of living from God’s giving nature, on the way with Jesus. When we make our direction God’s way, when we determine to turn our eyes from the advertising to the star, we will see for ourselves God’s joy. When we follow that star, we’ll feel that joy.

Amen.

The music on the audio track is “Christmas Is Coming”, Licensed as CC BY 4.0 Deed Attribution 4.0 International


Get Ready!

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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.

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight”.

Every 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, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” [Luke 3:4b-6]

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.