Josh Bascom, “Your Redemption is Drawing Near”

In Advent, during these weeks leading up to Christmas day, we focus on the themes of waiting, of embracing the darkness of winter and the reality of the darkness of our lives. Advent can be a heavy and serious season, and while I love Advent and I certainly feel attracted to heavy and serious conversations, I do think that we in the church can be guilty of adding a little too much of that weight back on to our already overburden plates during Advent. 

I often see or hear Christians talk about fighting the good fight during advent, about “putting the Christ back in Christmas”, as some like to say, by rejecting all the commercialization of the season. By not putting up their Christmas trees until Christmas Eve, by standing their ground against the extension of Christmas away from the candlelit sanctuary on December 24th and into the shopping malls and grocery stores in November. Folks with this mindset certainly aren’t wrong. 

I went to Lowe’s back in September to get something for a bathtub I was working on, and in order to get to the plumbing section I had to walk around an enormous Christmas display—not back to school, not Halloween, not Thanksgiving, but Christmas in September. I have to be honest…I kind of loved it!

I love the entire month, or many months, of Christmas. My kids meet Santa Claus for the first time in their lives last week and I couldn’t have been more excited—they were terrified, but I was excited! I might get in trouble with our Bishop for saying this, I’m pretty sure I’m under some sort of contract to only talk about the 12 days of Christmas, but I really love it all. And the reason I love the extension of Christmas into Advent, and you might even say advent into Halloween, is this; for one season, whether we’re aware of it or not, we broadcast loud out into the universe just how desperate we are for something to celebrate, just how frantic we are for some good news and good cheer in our lives, and while we may not be delivered from our distress in precisely the way we want to be, every year, without fail, miraculously you might say, Christmas does come. 

And so, a little indirectly, we could say that this explosion and extension of Christmas does the work of Advent in a beautiful way, because it shows us how desperately in need we are, and how hard the waiting can be. 

The Gospel reading today from Luke begins with a long list of historical names:

Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate governor of Judea, Herod ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, the high priests of Annas and Caiaphas, and finally with the word of God coming to John the Baptist, son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

These are real names and real places, and that’s important because all of this is real. It’s not a fantasy, it’s not just an idea, it’s the true story of everything, the true story of our deepest need being met over and over again with salvation. The names, the people here, they’re just like us, they too are waiting, they too are in need of something miraculous breaking in and breaking them out from the challenges of their lives. But in this long list of names, it’s not the emperor or the high priest who God speaks to and choses as His prophet to proclaim the Gospel out into the world, God Speaks to John the Baptist rather than the others. Not the prepared, not the well trained, not the polished, not the powerful, not the winners, God chose a wild man out in the woods eating bugs to be his messenger. 

And what this man John the Baptist says or is quoted about him from an old prophecy back in Isaiah is something beautiful and memorable and also a little bit troubling when we read that he will proclaim a baptism of repentance: 

"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 is of course about the second coming of Jesus, when the crucified and resurrected Lord will return again at last to wipe away every tear, to right every wrong and to raise us all to him, the living and the dead on a final day of Judgement and mercy. A better description of what we’re all longing and waiting for you will never find, and yet part of it makes me a bit anxious, the troubling part being this idea that we’re being called to prepare the way of our Lord. If you’re at all like me you’re sitting there thinking, “Me? I’m supposed to prepare the way for the Lord? I’m so desperate for some good cheer in my life that I bought a case of egg nog in October! I’m not sure I’m the one who’s up for the task of preparing the way for Jesus to return.”  

And we’re right to think this, none of us are up for the task. This is why we wear purple during Advent, just like we do during Lent, because Advent is also a penitential season, when we focus on repentance and do our best to prepare ourselves for the upcoming day, whether it’s Easter or Christmas or the Second Coming of Jesus itself. There is a lot of waiting in Christianity because there’s a lot of waiting in life—waiting for a test result, waiting for an upcoming medical procedure, waiting on an email about a job, waiting for yourself to finally make a decision about your future, waiting for him to stop drinking, waiting for something/anything to change—it feels like life is full of one waiting room after another. Waiting for the signal to change so you can cross the street, waiting for your kids to finally get out of diapers, waiting for your child who you haven’t spoken to in years to call, waiting for the money to run out, waiting for the divorce papers to be signed, waiting for someone to love you, and as we wait the illusion that we’re in control of our lives fades away and our worries creep in. 

In a memoir about his lifelong struggle with anxiety, Atlantic editor Scott Stossel describes anxiety as a future-oriented emotion for a future-oriented animal:  

“Humans have always and ever been anxious…As soon as the human brain became capable of apprehending the future, it became capable of being apprehensive about the future. The ability to plan, the ability to imagine the future—with those come the ability to worry, to dread the future.” 

So, who can blame us for reaching for that box of Christmas light a few days earlier this year—a little light, a little distraction. 

During Advent and Lent there is a lot of talk about preparing ourselves and preparing the way for Jesus and for the future. But we don’t do that through any kind of Christian calisthenics, instead all we’re truly being asked to do here is to fall on our knees and repent, to proclaim with confident humility, that we’re a little or maybe a lot lost, that we need some help, that we still need Jesus each and every day. 

This work of repentance, if you want to call it work, is all about being shown and coming to know who we truly are. Which is to say, being painfully shown how desperately we’re in need of some comfort and joy, some forgiveness and deliverance from the crooked and broken pathways of our lives, this is what repentance and Advent show us. And so when you hear John the Baptist talk about preparing the way of the lord by repenting, what he’s saying is that we prepare the way for our salvation to come by acknowledging that this is not our journey to God but it’s God’s journey to us. Advent brings with it the sense that something is approaching us. We are not approaching it. 

A theologian once wrote, “it is impossible to state too clearly that only the coming Lord Himself can make ready the way for His coming…The end or the goal of all preparation of the way of Christ must lie precisely in perceiving that we ourselves can never prepare the way ourselves.” That theologian was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who famously wrote all about the “Cost of Discipleship”, who even more famously spent the last 18 months of his life watching and waiting in a Nazi prison cell.

Advent gives us this sense that something is coming—we want it, we need it, even if we might not be sure what exactly is coming for us over that hill. But we know we need something to change, for some air to be let out of our life balloon before it pops. 

The good news of Advent is that we’re not waiting alone. Everything we know and can expect when it comes to the mystery of the second coming is only possible because of the first coming. 

'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.'"

We know that as we wait for this day to come, we’re not waiting in vain, because the one who will come and set all things right, who will bring justice and reveal all truth, He has already come and revealed himself to be our friend and redeemer—the one who loves us so much, in the midst of all our anxious waiting, that he gave up his life for us on a cross. 

We may be waiting eagerly for some Christmas joy or any kind of joy to break into our hearts and homes, but we aren’t waiting for the grace of God, because we’ve already received that, Jesus’ love and mercy and the powerful presence of the holy spirit acting with us and for us, those gifts have already been delivered. As we wait for our redemption, drawing near, we’re waiting with the grace of god, not for it. So, string up your Christmas lights (you have my permission), break out the egg nog and wait by the fire with confident humility, knowing that your savior, your friend and your redeemer is once again on his way, and that He will set all our pathways straight with His grace and by His mercy for you.   

Amen