Luke 3:1 - 6
In the Gospel of Luke we’ve gone from the early days of the life of Jesus when John was leaping for joy in his mother’s womb to when he is now an adult living in the desert on locusts and honey.. You can’t get to Christmas without going through John. So we should pay attention when the Church highlights him. Luke places him very precisely in time; it was during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was Governor, and Herod was king, and so on. But Luke wants us to notice something else; the word of the Lord did not come to those political and religious leaders with power and prestige; it came to a man who had rejected all of that. Because John, the son of a priest, was entitled to be part of the hereditary priesthood. But instead, he has gone out into the desert.
So the first thing about this gospel is that Advent is a time to go out into the desert, at least figuratively. We won’t hear the voice of the Lord when we are occupied with our usual concerns. The voice of the Lord is usually a still small voice, as the prophet Elijah learned. Most of us won't be knocked off a horse and blinded on the road to Damascus, as happened to Saint Paul. But the more we are tied up with all that occupies our time, the less we will hear that voice of God.
When I was growing up, Advent was something like Lent; you gave something up, you said more prayers, you tried to get ready for the coming of the Christ child. And that was a good thing -- it reminded you of the fact that you were a Catholic Christian. And we should do something like that -- not for penance, but to increase our ability to hear and react to the voice of our Lord, who is always speaking to us in the people around us, in our church, in our scriptures, in our daily experiences. We need to pay attention and listen. Advent is a time for listening.
The second thing about this story is that John calls us to repentance. Sin is not a fashionable topic anymore. Nothing seems to be evil enough to condemn. I read that the Chicago school system has now mandated that all the schools have gender neutral bathrooms. You can buy marijuana all over this state, and only a few years ago our Vice President was locking people up for long prison sentences for possessing the drug. And people are going crazy worrying about a future where there may be some restrictions on the right to kill your unborn child. And we kind of ignore societal sin, figuring that as long as we keep our own noses clean, we are alright. But we are part of society, we are guilty of its sin, we need to repent. Repentance, in the scriptures, doesn’t mean that we feel sorry for something. It means that we recognize that evil exists, that it surrounds us, that by ourselves we can’t do much about it, but most of all, that we need a savior. Advent is a time to deepen our ability to recognize sin. If we don’t see that we are immersed in a sinful world, that we are part of a sinful world, we won’t see that we need Christ to come into it.
Finally, John is out in the desert. If you’ve been to the desert, or to a mountaintop, or out on the ocean, or really really ill, or suffered a great loss, maybe you've had that sense that many have in those situations -- a sort of new perspective on things. You feel how small you really are, how vulnerable you are to the natural forces that we think we control with our sturdy houses and indoor plumbing and heating. In the desert we are in touch with our helplessness, and we begin to recognize how truly privileged we are. We need desert experiences to restore and affirm the sense of gratitude we should have, for all the good things God gives us. Advent is a time to count our blessings and be grateful for them.
So we have three more weeks to get ready, to listen to God’s word to us, to recognize that we live in the middle of a fallen world and we need a Savior; and to see how blessed we are and thank God for that. And then we will be in a situation where we will be prepared to welcome God’s greatest gift to us, the one who comes down from heaven to become one of us, the one who gave up his life for us, the one who feeds us with his Body and Blood, keeping his promise to be with us to the end of time.
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