The Road to Christmas

Luke 3: 7-18

Third Sunday in Advent, Year C

December 13, 2009        

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Several years ago, when I started exploring the preaching history of the church, I discovered something very interesting about the way the church has preached its way toward Christmas.  Two of these four Sunday’s is normally spent considering the preaching of John the Baptist which places the appropriate emphasis upon “preparation”.   The major point of this tradition: You can’t get to Jesus without first going through John.

And John is not an easy guy to go through.  He is a big, robust, opposing figure in the Bible.  We might call him the “Michael Oher” of the New Testament, although I think “Michael” is a pushover compared to John.   But the truth is this: just like you can’t get to the quarterback unless you go through 325 pound right tackle Michael Oher, you can’t get to Jesus without having to deal with the preaching of John.

Today I want us to think of John’s preaching as the “road to Christmas”.   All of us know the importance of having good roads so that we can travel to our destination.   We take them for granted until they become damaged or impassable, but the truth is we all rely upon roads to take us where we need to go each and every day: to see family,  to go to town, to go to the doctor or to come to church today.   Roads make life possible.

True faith is also made possible by living on the ‘right’ way.   In fact, early Christianity was called, “The Way”.    This concept of living the ‘way’ comes from John’s own preaching based upon Isaiah’s great prophecy (Isaiah 62) to “prepare the way of the Lord” (Luke 3:4).   In the Bible, the oldest understanding of a road or highway comes from the times when Kings built highways through the land of Israel for commerce and waging war (Numbers 20:11) and then later Isaiah uses this image as a metaphor for God’s powerful and hoped for saving work in the world.   This highway of God is a way of holiness which through a great partnership between God and his people, a spiritual highway of faith and hope is built through the desert of life (Isaiah 35:8) so God’s glory can be revealed  (Isaiah 40: 3).    The point John is clear:  by preparing the road in the desert of our lives, a “free-way” is made for God’s saving work.

WHY BUILD A NEW HIGHWAY?

During 5 years of my childhood, an interstate was being built near my home.   However, at first I did not see this as a good thing.  Not only was the interstate going to cut down some of my favorite hiking and camping places, it was going to take out my uncle’s house in Union Grove.    Needless to say, a few of us did not like the government making a new highway right through our territory.   Some of my friends and I could not understand “why”?   Why did they have to cut down our trees, go through our woods, and break up our serenity?   As adults we know the answer is one word: progress.   But it’s not just progress, it’s also survival.  A society filled with people needs more roads and must have good roads.   Any of us who have commuted to work or to doctor’s appointments in nearby cities takes for granted the roads we have.  

I recall when we first arrived in East Germany right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the one thing missing was good roads.  Hilter had invented the interstate system but these roads had not been replaced or updated in 50 years.   I’ll never forget one trip we took from Berlin to Dresden, a trip of 100 miles took us about 4 hours.  It was pot hole after pot hole, wave after wave and bump after bump; and this was the best road: the interstate.  The secondary roads would have taken much longer.  Every time you thought you were coming to a smooth place you fell back into a continual, unending route of ruts.  A few times, especially once when the Interstate became a “dirt road”, we wondered whether we would reach our destination at all.   

When we consider the highway of God, there is first, this major issue of “why?”   Of course we all know why sinful people need to “make a way” for God.  We humans are pretty good at destroying or letting our roads decay, aren’t we?    But there is a greater question here: Why do we need to “prepare” the way for God, when the great problem is that we need God to make the road for us?  

When you study the great prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, you find that the “roads” God’s people do or don’t build are part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Jeremiah stated the terrible spiritual reality right after Isaiah’s hope of God’s new highway had become a spiritual and political disaster.   Not only had God’s people not built the “road” for God, but they choose to keep traveling their own roads.   Listen to Jeremiah 18: 15ff:  ⁵ But my people have forgotten me, they burn offerings to a delusion; they have stumbled¹ in their ways, in the ancient roads, and have gone into bypaths, not the highway,  ¹⁶ making their land a horror, a thing to be hissed at forever. All who pass by it are horrified and shake their heads. Jeremiah 18:15-16. 

Such a tragic reality caused the prophet Isaiah to quickly change his hope from “prepare the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 61) to “tear open the heavens and come down” (Isa. 64:1) because, as the prophet continues, “we have all become unclean…all our righteousness is like dirty rags…” and he concludes, “all our places…are ruins”, so “after all this, will you restrain yourself…will you remain silent?” (64: 11-12).   And this is exactly how the Old Testament ends…with this terrible, terrible silence, that is, until this voice of John shows up crying in the wilderness in the opening pages of the New Testament.  John looks beyond the spiritual ruins and desolation and cries out once more; “prepare the way of the Lord!”   John even brings up the renewed possibility that there is something we can and must do to make God’s way possible in the world.  His metaphor includes the ancient image of highway construction in verse 5, as “every valley shall be filled, every mountain and hill brought low; and the crooked made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth.”   When this is done he says, then “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”  (Luke 3:5).

I don’t think any of us here today would question the need for finding hope in our own dirty, desert-crusted, barren and spiritually thirsty world?  It would be a very nice picture, indeed, if we would or could heed John’s pressing cry and build a road so God could travel back into our lives and bring his renewal and blessings into our world.  


For a year and a half now, our country has been wondering, and we still wonder: when is this financial wilderness going to end, just like we are also wondering, when is this time of war in the middle east going to end?  Is there a way we can travel into a brand new world of prosperity and hope?   Just over a week ago, President Obama promised that the war in Afghanistan will have limits and states we will begin see the war wind down in 2011.  But not long after his statement, his own staff states the reality that it will take longer than this.  Family after family who have soldiers on foreign soil wonder, when will this war end.  Some politicians are wondering can this war be won at all?  At the same time, all of us wonder, is there any road back to the prosperity we once had in this nation?  Is there any way to hasten the return from the edge of the cliff we are teetering on? 

I can imagine such political and practical questions of John’s own day, brought people out to hear John preach.  I don’t think John was that great a preacher to draw the crowds he did (though he was a strange one) as much as I think the people were ready and waiting for a voice to speak out about their situation.  They had had enough of the failure, corruption and wilderness politics of their day.  Their vote for John was not so much a vote for God, as it was probably a vote against Herod and against Rome and against their world.    They came gladly to hear John because they were sick and tired of being sick and tired.   They were tired of living in a political wilderness.   They were tired of having their lives overshadowed by the tall mountains of power than unjustly enslaved and mistreated them.  They wanted God to do something, not so much because they wanted God, but they wanted to get out of the mess they were in.

STAND THERE, DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING

I believe that the people came to John wanting God to do something.  They came to John feeling like many of us feel these days: hopeless, helpless and stuck in a world that won’t easily come back together again.   I find it quite interesting that the first word John has is not and answer about what God can do, nor is John rushing to tell them what they can do.  But first John says: Repent.   Don’t do something, but first, just stand there!

We all need to pause this Christmas and evaluate not just where we are, but who we are.  Placing blame or giving overly simplistic answers doesn't automatically bring any kind of progress.  The first step John says is to: “Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance.” (3:8).

That’s easier said than done, isn’t it?   It so much easier to keep blaming and complaining than it is to take time to look into our own hearts.  And of course, countries do this.  People do this.  We’ve all done this, haven’t we?  We’ve all rushed to judgment before we seriously consider the issues from ever angle.  This is one thing that troubles me about Cable News and the way the media works today.  So much of the news feeds the blame, anger, and pointing fingers rather seriously asking us to look into our own hearts first.   


Did you know that this very shallow and selfish attitude is what got Socrates killed in ancient Rome?  In Athens everybody came to the debates with their own minds made up and had no room for negotiation.  The teacher and philosopher Socrates developed a way of debate that made people stop, think and look at their own ignorance first.   Nobody liked to admit they might have it wrong.  It doesn’t sell.  And that’s what worries me about our world.  We are so good at placing blame, getting angry and expressing our own opinions.   We are so good at having our ideas and opinions about what should be done, but who is ready to stop and just stand there and look into our own hearts first?

But this is what John says must come first.  Before the way can be made, before God can come down to us, and before a new world can come about in our lives; we have to first look into our own hearts.  We have to stop our blaming and complaining and we have to look into our hearts in a spirit of humble repentance.  “Bring fruits worthy of repentance”.  By “fruits” he’s not yet saying what we need do to build a new highway for God, as much as he declares where we need to begin.

Of course, it’s one thing to talk about getting our hearts right.   I can just imagine that first time John preached this message at the edge of the Jordan River and everyone, after hearing his word “repent”, were all looking at each other, wondering who was going to go first.   We in the church know better than most how easy it can be to know and use the language of Zion and not to mean anything by it.   “How was the sermon today?” the working Father asked his son.  “Oh, it was the same as last Sunday?”  “What do you mean?”  The son answered, “Well, last Sunday the preacher preached and everybody needed to get saved.  By this Sunday everybody must have got lost all over again, because he said they still needed to get saved.”    The little boy has a point, doesn’t he?  There’s no way to build a road unless something really changes.   And God’s message can’t save us unless it also changes us.  Repentance comes before salvation, because true salvation is about change; real change.  But it is about change in our hearts first before anything in our world can be changed.  But how do we change?  What does repentance look like in our world today?  

Charles Summers, a Presbyterian pastor in Richmond, Virginia, helped his city congregation visualize repentance by imagining John the Baptist as a modern day street preacher.  Listen to his words:

“He first appeared at the corner of Trade and Tryon, uptown, right under that statue of the gold miner.  There were secretaries, bankers, and people waiting to catch the bus---all hurrying in different directions.

            Then the shout went out: Repent, for the end is near.  The Kingdom of God is close at hand.  Repent and prepare the way of the Lord!”

            For a moment they all stopped dead in their tracks.  It was like a video suddenly put on pause.  Heads turned, and eyes went wide with surprise when they spotted the character.  He was dressed in a long white robe, with a leather belt.  And he had sandals on his feet.  His hair hung in long dreadlocks down to his shoulders, and his dark skin gleamed in the morning sun.  The man’s eyes scanned the crowd like searchlights.  The megaphone in his hand was like a foghorn, blasting through their clouded minds.  The fellow looked like a cross between the angel Gabriel and a reggae rock star.

            And what does he say: “Repent, I say, while you still have the time.  For God’s kingdom is very near.  And God’s chainsaw is already fired up and lying close to the tree, ready to clean out dead wood.  Word up, you children of snakes, you viper’s brood, filled with the poison of the age, crawling up in the slime of Babylon!  Word up, you business tigers, holding tightly to your cash all the while you are ready to prey on the weak and helpless.  Word up!  Turn around while there is still time.”         

    

Each of us could conjure up our own images of “street preachers” or what John’s preaching must have been like.   But what I still wonder, where they prepared for what was saying?   John did not say, “Down with the government!  Down with Rome or Herod!  He didn’t even say, “The end has come!”, but he said, if you want a new world it begins in you, first: Repent!

This is also how the road to Christmas begins. First we must Stop! Look! and Listen!  Stop and consider what you are doing.  Look into your own heart and then listen to God’s voice within you.  If you want to change the world, first ‘stand there’ and consider what you need to do within yourself first, before you do anything and even before you think or express your opinion.  This is where true Christmas begins.  It begins within our own hearts.

John Denver used to have a tear-jerker country song, “Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas!  I don’t want to hear my mama cry.”  I don’t know why John Denver used chose to put that song on his Christmas Album unless he had an alcoholic Father himself.   What I do know is that John Denver's song sounds a lot more like John's version of what needs to happen before we get to “Away in the Manger….no crying he makes.”  If Christmas is true, really true, it must begin in our own hearts first.  It’s not about what happens or doesn’t happen in the world around us, but Christmas begins with who we are or who we aren’t.  The true spirit of Christmas is much less about what we get or don’t have, but it begins when we confront who we are, right now.

This is greatest challenge of Christmas, isn’t it?  It is the hardest thing to do this time of year.  It’s almost as if we have all our parties and events scheduled just so we don’t have time to stop and ask ourselves: how could Christmas come more fully if I changed in my own heart?   The one thing John says we must begin with is often the last thing we have time for on our Christmas list.

DO SOMETHING, DON’T JUST STAND THERE

Oswald Chambers, the great preacher of another generation, was once complimented on his sermon and then he said to the person giving the compliment: “Yes, thank you, but what did it do?” (From “Luke”, William Barclay’s “Daily Bible Study”, p. 35).   This very question comes from these three groups who listened to John preach and the effectiveness of John’s preaching is proved when they each ask the million dollar question: “What shall we do?”   (3: 10, 12, 14)).  

Most interesting perhaps, is how John does not answer.  He does not say “go to church more”, “get religion” , “come down to the altar”, or “take the preacher by the hand.”   John is not looking for religious form, but real substance.   We can also notice that John does not tell people to go to great extremes or showy, dramatic conversions by asking them to “sell everything” and “become missionaries in Africa”.  Certainly there is a great need for people to make sacrifices and to minister to the needs of the world, but going to the extremes or pushing the boundaries of normalcy is not how repentance is explained.  For John repentance is both a practical and normal experience of life.   It is as if he is saying that turning toward God and building a highway for him in our lives is something any of us can do.

What is also interesting is that the answers given may have been “new” roads for them, but are not “new” to God’s people.  Each answer looks directly back to the very heart of the Covenant and shows how “change” comes into our hearts in very particular and specific ways.  John’s road to God leaves the lofty spiritual language of the great prophets and gets down to the “Nity gritty” of life.

We can summarize John’s three recommendations with three words that are easy to remember:  SHARE! DARE! and CARE!


The first word of John is SHARE:  How do you do to make a road for God? How do you repent: Share “He that has two coats give to him who has none…he that has no meat do the same….”

The most practical word for traveling to Christmas is the first: Share!   Renewal comes to our hearts when we think less about ourselves and respond to the needs of others around us.  This is always how God comes and how Christmas comes into our lives.

Recently Arla Cutts sent out a touching email video based on a ministry of giving un-needed, warm coats to people in need.  The video catches your attention in a most personal way because as you watch the video of a person giving away an “unused” coat to someone in need the box is open and a name tag inside the coat is show with a name on it.  The name is yours.

What can you do to bring God and Christmas spirit into your life: Share!   John uses the need to share a coat or food.  But sharing can come in many packages.  The most meaningful moments in our lives are when we share ourselves with others.  We all know this, but how will your “name” get on some event this Christmas season, when you share with another who is in need?

The second word, straight from John’s recommendation is: Dare!  It is a very daring thing John suggests to the next group, isn’t it?   He tells those “tax collectors” to “exact no more than is required.”  The second movement of a truly repentant heart is not what you can do, but what you might stop doing!  

 

We all like Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol, because it attacks both the Scrooge among us and the Scrooge within us.  Like Ebenezer Scrooge, something the very thing that prevents God and good cheer is what is going on in us and what needs we must get a handle on or stop.   That is perhaps the most daring deed.  Try to stop something: a bad habit, a bad work, a bad attitude, whatever it is: “stop” something and you can make Christmas real and God comes near.

But it is hard to “stop” if it means cutting off the hand that might be feeding you, isn’t it?  Last week on the news they brought back the tragic but inspirational story of Aron Ralston, the mountain climber who after five days of being trapped by a boulder, amputated his arm to save his life.   More recently, another man in S.C. was trapped by a “corn picker” that set the field on fire and had to do the same thing with his pocket knife.  Interestingly, both men feel their lives have been blessed by what they lost. 

Sounds crazy, or doesn’t it?  To think that you gain your life by what you can lose?   Jesus himself said it’s true: ³ If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell,¹ to the unquenchable fire.²  Mark 9:43. 

It might, at first sound very strange to think about Christmas by what we need to lose or give rather than what we might get or have.   But “strange” is what John the Baptist is known for and we all know, God too works in some very “strange” ways.  

The final word based on John’s answer is CARE.  His final recommendation to the question of “what can we do?” is heard clearest in the King James own version of Luke 3: 14: “And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do?  And he said unto them, “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.”    Do you see the full irony of John’s words?  Here John is “demanded” by Roman soldiers to answer: What shall we do?  His answer is as hilarious as it is revealing.  John tells these soldiers who are trained to kill rather than be killed, to “do violence to no man….”  How does a soldier do this?

I think it would be interesting to be a military chaplain in Afghanistan earlier this morning and to be reading this Advent text just before some troops deployed.  How would our own soliders respond?  Maybe they'd hear the word like a word from God: “Who does this guy think he is—the Messiah?”

My guess is that right now, if this Scripture is being read today somewhere by a chaplain in the war zone, they would all know that the war they are fighting can’t really be won only with war tactics.  Wars only end, really end, when people start to care---to care about each other, and even by learning to love their enemy.   This is still the craziest notion on the battle field or in our own lives, but it is still the greatest gospel truth and the only thing that works and saves: you only win at life--when you care.

In the 2008 movie, Chaos Theory, a man’s life falls apart.  Ironically, this becomes interesting because it is this man’s job as a professional writer and speaker to help other people working in the business world to get and keep their lives together.   In the movie, without warning; this guy’s wife thinks he’s committed adultery, but he hasn’t.  The hospital calls his wife and tells her, he’s the Father of someone else’s baby, but he isn’t.  Then, worst of all he discovers, in trying to prove his innocence, that the doctor says he is incapable of having a child, but he has a child---a five-year old daughter.  Then, if you think this is bad, he then discovers that his best friend is the father, even though neither his wife nor his friend knew it, until now.  And now that the truth is out, everything is suddenly chaos. 

What should he do in this situation?  How does his little index cards he often uses to organize his life, help him map his way out of his own chaos?   He lists three priorities: 1. Kill his best friend, Johnny.  2.  Kill his wife, Susan and 3. Then, kill himself.    Let me help you better understand this move by saying it is a comedy, but there is not just humor but also a great truth in it.  And the greatest truth comes out right near the end in the way he finally finds his bearings and starts to rebuild and reorganize his life: It comes together not when he gets all his theories together or his index cards prioritized, but when he realizes that to his little girl only knows him as her father—and she needs him.  Only when stops figuring everything out and starts caring, is able to starting forgiving and reclaiming his life  (Chaos Theory, Wide Pictures, Released 2008).  

Share with those in need…  Dare to stop the things that get in the way…  and really stop and care about those who should be most important to you.  This is John’s road map to God and to Christmas…. And it is still our road map as well.   The question today for us, is not: What should we do to get ready for Christmas, but will we do it?  Will we share with those in need?  Will we dare to “cut out” something, in order to have more of life?  And finally, will we “care” in this world that is already filled too with too much anger, violence and incivility?  Getting ready for Christmas or finding our way back to God might not be any more complicated than this either.  Amen.


© 2009 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.