December 10th, 2006
Well. What a turnaround from last week. Last Sunday, we got the end of the world warnings, both barrels. Last Sunday we heard of signs and portents that will precede the end of the world, and the message of change we need to make so that we will be ready for it. Wake up! we were told. Be alert. Pay attention. Watch for signs.
All of that was last week. This Sunday seems very different. This Sunday the messages from Scripture – from the Old Testament, from the psalm, and from the gospel - could be characterized quite differently. Taken both separately and together, these lessons are a message of hope. But they are not unconnected to last week’s warnings, because even these gentler messages we hear today are connected with Advents, The Advent of the Incarnation, God coming to us in human form, in the person of Jesus, and the Advent of Christ coming again at the end of the ages. This morning we hear of promises to be fulfilled. This morning, we look closer at those promises, those prophetic voices, and their message of hope in this season.
So. We know that the essential message of the prophet, of any prophet, is this: God is coming, change your heart. The prophets, all of them really, proclaimed this message, loudly, for a long time. It was, as much as anything else, a warning: change your heart, or bad things will happen; you don’t want God to come while you are busy ignoring God’s teachings and not living God’s ways. Change your heart, or you won’t like what will happen. Change your heart, or what happens next will not be pleasant. You have it within you to change your heart; the only question is, do you have the will?
I’m speaking the message of the prophets in general, but I’m also speaking of one in particular. This would be the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah spent a lot of time proclaiming God’s message and warning the people of Israel to change their hearts. He spent a lot of time telling them that there would be dire consequences if they didn’t. He reminded them, over and over, that though they were content to live their lives with God on the periphery and not in the center, that path would lead to their own destruction. And the destruction had a name, and it had a place, and it had a reality. The people did not heed the warnings they had been given. And what happened to the people of Israel was a devastating annexing of their country by the Assyrian empire, with many Israelites taken as captives to Babylon. They were led out of their own land weeping. Remember the line of that psalm, ‘by the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept.’ These were the dire consequences that Isaiah had warned about, and in the fullness of time they did indeed come to pass. It was a dark time for the people Israel.
But there’s always a question to be asked, after the prophet’s voice has been heard (and even ignored.) That question is, what happens next? After the dire consequences come to pass; after the bad things happen; after the people experience the hardships which come upon them: what then? What next? Where do they go from there? What will God do, after all of these things?
This is the context in which we have to hear the lesson from Baruch, today’s first lesson. These words we hear today are the what next. And do you know what? The what next is actually a promise. Here these words again: “Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting; for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven.” I was struck first by the beauty of these words. In beautiful and poetic language, they indicate the beginning of the what’s next. First, the difficult time the people have experienced is spoken of in metaphorical form as clothing, as garments of sorrow and affliction. Take off those garments, the people are being told, and put on new ones. It is a new day; God is doing a new thing, so take off the clothing of exile, and of defeat, and of hardship, and put on instead the clothing of God’s righteousness and glory. A new day is dawning, that’s the promise. Baruch continues with the promise as he says: “Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east as the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne.” This specifically references the people’s exile, and their captivity in Babylon, this being led away by their enemies. But that day is no more. Now they will see a new picture: God’s children gathered once again, and God’s children rejoicing, for God has remembered. God has remembered them. God has remembered God’s promise to them. God has remembered God’s love for them. And this love, this promise, this remembering is the following through on the pledge of restoration. That’s what is so beautiful here. Israel will be restored, that is the promise and the vision. That is the new thing that is happening.
And there’s more. There are these words from Baruch: “For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God's command. For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.” In these words we can hear the echoes of the prophet Isaiah, quoted this morning by John the baptizer. And what is the nature of this promise? There are hills and there are valleys, and they are a geographical metaphor of the hardships and the despair that the people have experienced. They are the metaphor that stands in for the long walk home – up hill, and downhill, and up hill again, through peaks and valleys, a long, and difficult path. But there again is the promise: The high mountains and the hills will be made low. The valleys will be filled. The ups and downs will be leveled off – and this leveling will mean an easier walk home. A walk on level ground, ‘so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of the Lord.’ The promise of restoration starts with the homecoming, and God will make sure that God’s people can follow this path, without the strain and difficulty of those mountains and valleys. The promise is also of God’s presence, that God will walk with them, that the Lord will lead Israel with joy. This is beautiful language and it is a beautiful promise. And, you may ask, what the heck does it have to do with Advent? Why are we spending all of this time rhapsodizing about these words? What does the promise then have to do with our reality now?
What indeed. The promise is that God will walk with the people Israel, and show them the way home. That is the promise. And that is exactly the promise that we have in the coming of the Incarnate Word, when God will become flesh and dwell among us. And we will call this flesh Jesus, and he will change everything. He will change everything for us. That is the claim: Jesus will come, and for us everything will change. The promise of God will be fulfilled in Christ Jesus, that is the claim that our faith makes, and the one it makes especially during this season of Advent.
The other lesson that speaks explicitly of this promise is found in today’s psalm, which is not a psalm, but rather a song: the song of Zechariah. Zechariah is the father of John the Baptist. And Zechariah’s story is quite something. He and his wife Elizabeth are faithful, devout people. They come from the line of Aaron, the priests. Zechariah is one of the tenders of the temple, he has a holy job, passed down in the generations of his family. But they have no children, and they are aging, and it is with great shock that Zechariah has an angel come to him with news of his impending fatherhood. Zechariah wants to know how this will happen – after all, he tells the angel, he and Elizabeth are getting on in years. The angel doesn’t like this, so Zechariah has his speech taken from him for the duration of his wife’s pregnancy. He couldn’t speak the entire nine months, not until the ceremony where the baby was circumcised, when Elizabeth says the child will be named John and those there don’t think she knows what she’s talking about. Zechariah writes on a tablet, his name is John – and his tongue is freed and what we hear in place of the psalm this morning is what he and the Holy Spirit have to say, after all of that time of silence. And what we hear, just like in Baruch, is that the promise of God will be fulfilled. A savior of the house of David is going to be raised up, because God has remembered the promise that God made to our ancestors. And John? John will be called the prophet of the most high, his father says, for John will go before him to prepare his ways and proclaim this message of salvation. The dawn is breaking, God will fulfill the promises made, and life will never be the same. Not for Elizabeth and Zechariah, or for John, or for Mary or Joseph or all of those who followed Jesus. And nothing will be the same for any of us.
Because God has remembered God’s promise to this beloved people, and God has given us all that we need, in the person of Jesus. Here’s what we know about our God: our God is first and foremost a keeper of promises. The promise is one made long before we got here, and it will be here long after we are gone. The promise is that God will be with us. It is not a promise fulfilled out of nowhere; it is a promise with history, our salvation history, behind it. So today, again, the valleys will be filled and the hills will be made low. A level path will be created, a path to lead us back to God, a path which we know as Jesus. I am the way, Jesus will tell us. Follow me. I am the way. I will lead you into all truth. I will lead you into all righteousness. I will lead you into the heart of God, and there you will have all that you need. This is the promise of Advent: That the promise is on its way to being fulfilled. The candles we light on our Advent wreath are a concrete way of marking the coming fulfillment, again, of God’s promise to us. We stand in a long tradition, with Baruch and Zechariah as our forebearers, of people waiting for the promise of God to come true. And it is about to, again. That’s what Advent is for: to remember the promise, and to prepare ourselves for its fulfillment, today and in these next two weeks, as we anticipate the lighting of that white candle signifying that Christ has come again, as God promised.
Amen.