Malachi 3:1-4
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

John the Baptist is one of the principal figures of Advent. In this morning’s Gospel lesson, we are told: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee…the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…” Because we always hear about John the Baptist during the Advent season, when we are busily preparing for the coming of the Christ child on Christmas morning, it becomes easy for us to connect John, in our minds, with the baby that will be born in the manger in just a few short weeks; but, as the historical references at the beginning of this passage should remind us, John wasn’t the forerunner of the infant Christ, but rather the herald proclaiming the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry. If you think back to the story of Mary’s visitation to her kinswoman, Elizabeth (John’s mother), we see that John was only about 6 months older than his cousin, Jesus. It isn’t the infant King he’s proclaiming, but the coming of the Messiah.

John’s message to the people of his time was not entirely one of sweetness and light, either. He proclaimed a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” but there was a definite, apocalyptic edge to John’s preaching, with an energy and style that was far from conciliatory. We get a sample of that preaching in next week’s Gospel: “You brood of vipers!” John accuses. “Who told you to flee from the wrath to come?” For John, the word “prepare” isn’t about quietly getting ready for a nice, cozy family holiday by wrapping presents, writing cards, and baking cookies. It’s very much “Prepare — or suffer the consequences. Repent — or else!”

The writer of Luke’s Gospel identifies John as the one foretold by 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.’”

This passage is such a staple of the Advent and Christmas tradition that it is hard for me to read or hear it without starting to sing (or at least hum) the beautiful aria from Handel’s Messiah — but if we look beneath the beautiful language, beyond the familiar music, this passage actually evokes an enormous amount of upheaval. Filling every valley and leveling every hill, in reality, is more like an out of control mining operation, or a spectacularly huge earthquake; it is not a small change. “Every valley shall be raised up and every mountain and hill made low,” Isaiah promises — and we hear these words as a promise of peace and security. But we shouldn’t. John’s call to prepare offers us an opportunity to shift our perspective; though we may be tempted to imagine that the Advent message is that all good things come to those who wait (passively) for them, in reality, the preparation John preaches is more active. Prepare — with upheaval and effort — for the coming of God; change your heart, change your ways, change everything, because everything is about to change. Though we wait, in Advent, we must not wait passively; we must not neglect to do the preparatory work of prayer and action, repentance and change of heart.

In the passage from Hebrew Scripture, the prophet Malachi also talks about messengers preparing the way: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” But even this promise comes with a warning: “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.”

Some years ago, I became friends with a blacksmith — not a farrier (who shoes horses), though (as an equestrian) I also number farriers among my friends. The main difference is that a blacksmith works a forge. I used to watch my blacksmith friend, Luke, work with metal; sometimes, he even let me help — which usually involved tongs, very heavy fireproof gloves, and singeing hair, or scorching the skin on my cheeks and forehead. Refining metal and working it is neither an easy nor a comfortable process. The metal must be heated to the point where its impurities burn away. The image of the descendants of Levi being refined like metal is not a comfortable one. Again, it speaks of upheaval, of heat and fire and ash, of processes that are strenuous for the refiner and transformative (but not comfortable) for the material being refined. At the end of the process, you may have a thing of beauty — or a useful and necessary tool — but the end result is never achieved without sweat and effort.

It’s often our temptation, I think, to imagine that the central purpose of Jesus’ ministry was to comfort us, and to affirm us exactly as we are. This assumption makes us feel safe and loved, warm and fuzzy; but it’s not an accurate (or complete) understanding of Jesus’ message — then or now. I think possibly that John was closer to the truth: that there would be tremendous upheaval and disruption in people’s lives and in the social structure. Preparing for the coming of the Lord doesn’t involve shining the good silver and hanging up the banners; it means examining all the parts of ourselves and our lives and our social order that we would — by far — rather not examine; and, having done the examination and brought into light all the aspects we would rather ignore, it becomes our task to work to change them. Preparing for the coming of the Lord means taking responsibility for things we’d rather relegate to someone else, or ignore; it means repenting of comfortable, wasteful attitudes and habits, and thinking hard about the needs of others, and our common weal. Every valley shall be raised up and every mountain and hill made low.

With these powerful images of geologic and metallurgic transformation, I am rather uncomfortably aware that it takes a massive amount of fill to raise up a valley. It’s the tops of the mountains and hills that go into the valley to make everything level. And it takes a lot of energy, a lot of heat and fuel, to burn away the impurities in metal. We’re talking about a lot of upheaval, a lot of change, a lot of effort and energy dedicated to preparing the way of the Lord. Perhaps the message for us, this Advent, is a reminder that doing the ministry Christ’s Incarnation demands of us is a huge commitment. It’s not a matter of simply filling out a pledge card (though that is certainly a good and necessary place to start!), or of coming to church once in a while — or even every week. The warning John the Baptist brings reminds us we’re called to a major undertaking, which will challenge us all to grow and change both as individuals, and as the community of St. Barnabas’.

But it is still good news. As Zechariah (John’s father) prophesied at John’s birth: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” The Lord is coming; the Kingdom of God is at hand — and that is good news, holy news, life-giving news. That it also means we’ll have challenges and change, and many, many opportunities to expend our faithful and creative energy is not a bad thing. We are called into ministry with Christ, and John the Baptist reminds us that there’s more to responding than simply opening our eyes and looking expectant. There will be upheaval and change, and the peace and quiet that may be only one step away from dormancy will be broken; and we will emerge energized and filled with enthusiasm, even if we have smudges of mud on our faces and dirt under our fingernails.

So don’t get tricked into thinking that Advent — or the life of faith, itself — is a spectator sport! It’s not. We all have the opportunity to respond — actively and energetically — to God’s love and Christ’s call to us. And the more actively we respond, the more powerfully others will be drawn to us, to our community, and indeed to Christ. As the Apostle Paul says to the Christians at Philippi: “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.