December 7th ~ Every Time We Respond to Need, We Have Cleared the Path / 2nd Sunday of Advent

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Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

Sermon by Pastor Joel

This week a friend of mine fell and broke her wrist. She went to Emergency with my wife, Erin. And if any of you have been to Emergency recently, you can guess what happened next. It took more than an hour to be seen, and then another hour after that to get an X-ray, and then 17 hours after that to be seen by a doctor about the X-ray. They had gone in at 3 p.m. Erin went home to sleep at 11. And I saw our friend at 6:30a.m., just as she was finally getting her wrist frozen so they could adjust it for a temporary cast. She’d been up all night. All three of us discussed the experience chatting with people, making another visit to the waiting room, the loud and aggressive patients brought in by police in the middle of the night, the weary nurse who had to clean up when someone went to the bathroom in their pants, and then smoothly pilfer away the vodka mickey he’d hidden in his jacket. By the time Erin and our friend came home around noon the second day, she left the hospital without socks. She’d met an elderly man with cold feet and had given them away.

I spend a lot of time in hospitals, and they are places that represent the worst and the best of humanity. Sit in emergency long enough, and you see everything: kindness and cruelty, pain and relief, weariness and perseverance. And often, over all of it, I can feel loneliness. The act of wanting, desiring comfort, and reaching out only to find empty air.

Whenever I am exposed to this side of humanity – the evidence of our rich and yet flawed society failing our own humanness – I am also reminded of John The Baptist, who might have been more easily mistaken for the barefooted, dishevelled man brought in by the police, than the wise and self-sacrificing prophet that he was.

How clever it was, I have always thought, for the gospel and the Holy Spirit to wake John the Baptist up to pave the way for Jesus – and thus, to wake us all up. There is no other character like John the Baptist in the gospel. From every other disciple, I have always felt a sense of tidiness and propriety. But that is not John. He wore camel hair clothes, he probably rarely washed, and he ate locusts. He yelled at everyone. He would have been the last person you’d choose to sit beside in an emergency room. Maybe that’s what saved him for so long: the Pharisees may indeed have been a brood of vipers, but John was the meanest, most God-fearing rattlesnake they’d ever seen.

And yet who else but John could have avoided getting caught up in the fame of it all? No amount of adulation appears to have tempted him to take any credit. If anything, it just made him meaner. You ain’t see nothing yet, he told the people. I am not worthy even to carry the sandals of the guy coming next.

But most importantly, John said this: “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make the path straight.”

And that’s the crux of John. He wasn’t a ditherer or debater. He wasn’t going to strike a committee to solve a problem. Faced with a crooked path, he wasn’t going to consult or conduct a pilot project. If a path needed straightening, he straightened it. If a person needed food, he fed them. If an old man needed socks, he gave him the socks off his own feet. We don’t need that written down in the gospel to know it. This is just who John the Baptist was – the rebel who never met a rule he wouldn’t step over for the right reason. And what a great role model he is for us all.

We spend a lot of time – and I include myself here – thinking of what happens after we act. What happens if I talk to that the lonely neighbor? Will I have intruded? Will I have taken on too much? What happens if I offer my socks? Will I have offended? Will people just want more from me afterwards? And we think so much about doing that the moment passes, and we never do what we were thinking about.

But John sees a need – or a Pharisee in need of a good comeuppance – and he acts. He acts upon the need because his response in that moment is what matters; his response to what happens next is an entirely different issue – a problem or solution for later. John understands who he is and what his role is; and he does not bend on either to suit anyone else.

Now that’s a hard act to follow. So, it’s a good thing the next act was Jesus. But what can we learn from John heading into Advent? How can we make the path straight? We can think very clearly about what is most important to us, the quality that we want to define us. We can then find ways to transform those qualities into actions We can muffle the Pharisees of our day—consumerism and competition and materialism – and hold them at bay. We can heed the message of John the Baptist and use this season – this time when everyone’s hearts are open just a little wider, to create a straighter path - one pebble, one act of charity, one pair of socks at a time. Every time we respond to need, we have cleared the path. The next generous deed clears it a little bit more. Until one day, we are at our final destination, and we can look behind and see a great distance, and know that all this time, we were only making way for the gospel and God; we were clearing our own path to a spirit-led, gospel-infused meaningful life. Let this be a practice of ours in the weeks ahead—to prepare the way of the Lord and make the path straight.

Amen