Luke 1:68-79
Presented December 10th, 2006, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday of Advent
There is an old story told of four blind men who discover an elephant. Having never encountered an elephant before, the four grope about, seeking to understand and describe this new phenomenon. One grasps the trunk and concludes it is a snake. Another explores one of the elephant’s legs and describes it as a tree. The third finds the elephant’s tail and announces that it is a rope. And the final blind man, after discovering the elephant’s side, concludes that, no, it is a wall.
Try as we may, it is difficult to fully grasp the truth of the gospel message. You may remember the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (v. 12). Each of the blind men grasped dimly a part of the truth, but they were not yet able to grasp the full essence of the elephant. And so it may be for us as well.
The Scriptures are filled with stories of people who display a peculiar combination of faith and misunderstanding. During the period of exile, that difficult time in Israel’s history when Jerusalem was destroyed and many of the people were forced to live in exile in Babylon, the ancient Israelites displayed both faithfulness and unfaithfulness. They recalled God’s steadfast love and the joy of worshiping with fellow Israelites in the now-destroyed Temple, memories that led them to cry out, in the 137th psalm, “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” The psalmist continues, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!” (vv. 4-6).
Words of remarkable devotion. And yet, these same Israelites, urged by Jeremiah to bloom where they are planted, to settle into life in Babylon, even to recognize that their welfare is integrally related with the welfare of their captors—these same Israelites resist the call to expand their vision and to offer light to the people of Babylon. And years later, when the exiles are able to return to their beloved homeland, only to find it still in ruins, they begin to rebuild, but reject offers of help from those who had remained behind during the years of exile. A choice stood before the people—to retrench and to hold others at a distance, or to embrace the high calling of being light for all peoples and all nations. All too frequently the people chose the pathway of retrenchment, building walls of fear and suspicion. A peculiar blend of faith and misunderstanding.
This morning’s Gospel lesson falls at the conclusion of the remarkable story of the birth of John the Baptist. Zechariah the aged priest was serving in the inner sanctum of the Temple when an angel appeared to him announcing that Zechariah’s wife Elizabeth would give birth to a son, John the Baptist, harbinger of Jesus. When Zechariah gives voice to his doubts, daring to question how this shall be, since Elizabeth had been unable for so many years to conceive a child, he is struck mute, unable to utter one word. Months later, neighbors of Zechariah and Elizabeth gather to celebrate with them the birth of their son and to be present with them for the child’s ritual circumcision. At the moment in the ritual when the infant is to be named, the neighbors and kinfolk, assuming that the boy will be named for his father, proceed in Zechariah’s silence to name him. But Elizabeth objects, asserting that the name shall be John, meaning “gracious gift from God.” The friends and kin, however, brush aside Elizabeth’s words, turning instead to Zechariah for confirmation that the infant shall indeed be named Zechariah after his father.
But Zechariah startles them—twice. Writing on a tablet, he indicates that the child will instead be named John. And then, even more surprisingly, Zechariah suddenly regains his voice, joyfully praising God and celebrating what God will do through his son John. Proclaims Zechariah,
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 the people by the forgiveness of their sins.By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:76-79).
It’s a glorious description of John the Baptist’s calling as a key player in the unfolding drama of Jesus—the call to prepare the way for Jesus’ coming, to provide tender mercy and light to those who sit in darkness, to guide the feet of the faithful into the ways of peace. But it’s intriguing, isn’t it, that John is frequently anything but tender as he passionately announces the need for repentance. “You brood of vipers!” cries John to the crowds who flock to the wilderness in hopes that something new was unfolding in their midst. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8). In other words, change your lives in a most radical way. Experience a thoroughgoing transformation of the heart.
In his book Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who Frederick Buechner offers this description of the Baptist:
John the Baptist didn’t fool around…. When he preached, it was fire and brimstone all the way.
The Kingdom was coming all right, he said, but if you thought it was going to be a pink tea, you’d better think again. If you didn’t shape up, God would give you the axe like an elm with the blight or toss you into the incinerator like what’s left over when you’ve lambasted the good out of the wheat…. Your only hope, said John, was to clean up your life as if your life depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had. “I’m the one yelling himself blue in the face in the wilderness,” John said, quoting Isaiah. “I’m the one trying to knock some sense into your heads” (Matthew 3:3).
Once Jesus began his ministry, John, so eager to knock sense into the heads of his fellow Israelites, found himself baffled by the tender and compassionate ways in which Jesus related, so much so, the Gospel writers tell us, that he sent several of his disciples to ask of Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Luke 7:19). Jesus’ answer: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them” (7:22).
Like John the Baptist before him, Jesus is in the business of turning life upside down—or perhaps more accurately, turning life right side up—but Jesus does so with a tender mercy and a compassionate spirit. Both John and Jesus were disturbed by the disparity between what life is and what life ought to be. But while John was ready to see judgment befall the people, almost eagerly anticipating a smashing of the unfaithful to smithereens, Jesus comes, tenderly inviting, encouraging, urging his hearers to embrace a radically new way of living. Brian McLaren in his book A Generous Orthodoxy puts it this way:
Jesus comes as a liberating, revolutionary leader…. His kingdom is a kingdom not of oppressive control but of dreamed-of freedom, not of coercive dominance but of liberating love, not of top-down domination but of bottom-up service, not of a clenched iron fist but of open, wounded hands extended in a welcoming embrace of kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, and grace.
Jesus comes displaying the tender mercy of God. Indeed, the very heart of the Advent and Christmas story is this good news that God chooses to become one with us. Robert McAfee Brown in his book Spirituality and Liberation puts it this way:
The messianic hope is a long-shot gamble that the mess [of the human situation] can be cleaned up, and that God cares enough about the place where the mess has accumulated to send a messiah to work right there for its transformation rather than its destruction. Instead of scrapping the created order as a divine miscalculation, creation will be remade.
This promise, that creation will be renewed and remade, stands at the heart of our tender God’s relationship with the world, and God invites those of us who seek to walk in paths of discipleship to discern our own way of embodying God’s mercy, justice, peace, and loving kindness. We are invited and encouraged to discover our own calling, our own method for incarnating God’s compassionate love. For the contemplative Thomas Merton, embracing tender mercy centered upon the call to live as a monk. And yet, as the years passed, Merton came to see that his monastic calling led him back into the world, through his writings, through his passion for an ending of warfare and the embracing of peace, through his reaching out to persons of other faiths and traditions in a common thirst for life connected to God.
For the early Brethren, the call to incarnate God’s love came as a call to count the cost of discipleship, to turn from a church that had become rigid, lifeless, tied to the state, forming instead a new community of those whose passion it was to embody Christ’s peace and Christ’s tenderness. For the German church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this call to incarnate God’s surprising mercy led him from the relative safety of theological teaching in the United States to return to Germany and to leadership in the Confessing Church, standing in opposition to the Nazi movement. For Mother Teresa, the call involved leaving the convent and starting an order dedicated to caring for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. And for Martin Luther King, Jr. the call was one of confronting and challenging long-held patterns of injustice and racism, yearning and praying and working instead for the creation of “the beloved community,” those who embody values of justice, compassion, equality and peace.
The message of the incarnation is that God is taking the risk of renewing, re-creating, redeeming human life. And we who would embrace relationship with this tender God—we too are called to be about the business of making all things new, doing justice, loving tenderly, walking humbly with God and with one another. May it be so among us, this day and all our days! Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Gracious God, we stand on tiptoe, eager for the coming of that day when swords are beaten into plowshares, when nations no longer teach the ways of war, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, when all creation sees and reflects your glory. We stand on tiptoe, praying that while we are waiting, your kingdom might come in all its fullness, your will be done, in us and among us and throughout the world, even as it is in heaven. Jesus, Lord, Immanuel, God-with-us, come with peace and with your surprising power of tender mercy and compassionate love. Come, transforming our fears into faith, our sadness into joy, our despair into hope, our anxieties into new life. Come, Christ Jesus, transform our hearts and our world. Renew us. Re-create us. Redeem us. Set us free to serve one another, and all creation.
God of forgiveness, forgive us when we dismiss your vision for life as too far beyond us. Forgive us when we do not chafe at the status quo, when we become too easily satisfied with business as usual, when we are tempted to lose our passion to deepen faith, proclaim peace, embrace community, welcome others, and serve our neighbor, in the compassionate spirit of Jesus.
God of healing and wholeness, hear us now as we pray for those for whom the Advent and Christmas seasons are difficult—those grieving the death of a loved one, those struggling with mental, spiritual, emotional issues, those for whom life seems especially precarious right now. Touch each, O God, at their point of need, their place of deep yet often unvoiced yearning.
God of all creation, we stand with eager longing for the revealing of your kingdom. Fill us with hope and with trust, as we seek to walk in the footsteps of Christ Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us. Amen.