A sermon based upon Luke 3: 1-6
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Second Sunday of Advent C, December 9th, 2018 (2 of 5 Messages from Luke)
On this second Sunday of Advent we want to talk about a really big topic, from just a few verses of Scripture in the early part of Luke’s gospel. Specifically, I want to focus on what Luke names in verse 6 of this text as ‘God’s salvation’.
Isn’t this why we have Christmas? There would have never been the Advent season, nor would there have been Christmas had Christmas not been about God’s salvation being announced through the birth of a Jewish child named Jesus; a name which means “God saves”.
But it is possible, in the midst of all the activities, festivities and fun of this season, to lose track of what the season is about. Once a little boy who was trying to pray the Lord’s prayer accidently prayed: “Lord, forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us.” There is something accidently and also ironically true about that little boy’s mistake. We can get all sentimental or we might even serious about Christmas, but still miss what God’s salvation should mean for us, in our lives and in our world right now.
The story of John the Baptizer’s is an important part of the Christmas story exactly because John and his preaching helps us prepare our hearts the gospel of Christmas. For Christmas is not just about God’s salvation that once came into this world, but it also about the salvation we need now.
HE WENT…PREACHING
What might be surprising to some, is that God’s salvation is a story that preaches Jesus and worships Jesus, but God’s salvation did not originally begin with Jesus.
John’s preaching reminds us that even before Jesus was born, voices were already announcing that one day ‘all people will see God’s salvation’ (3:6). The words John preached were not his own words, but they were combined quotes from two different Hebrew prophets, who both envisioned that someday soon God’s salvation would not just be for a few people, meaning it would not just be a salvation only for Israel or for the Jews, but they predicted that one day God’s salvation would extend to ‘all people’ everywhere: “All people will see God’s salvation (v.6).”
This is a big step, isn’t it---to understand how one people’s God would become another’s people’s God, meaning that the God of one particular people, tribe or nation, would become the God of everyone? But this ‘universalizing’ of God’s love and God’s salvation is exactly the direction the Bible takes us at Christmas.
Christmas is the message that Israel’s God, who is also the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is big enough, great enough, powerful enough and true enough to be the God of everyone. What came to be fully and finally realized in Jesus, is that only the God who is big enough to save everyone, is the God who can save anyone.
This is the ‘flow’ and direction of the ‘salvation story’ in the Bible, but can we still ‘go with this flow’ with our modern minds and our scientific hearts? For many people today, even in the churches too, Christmas is more about family and traditions than it is about salvation. It is getting harder and harder to wrap our minds and our hearts around what the Bible claims; that in Jesus Christ, ‘all people…see God’s salvation’. And if we still do believe this, that ‘God’s salvation’ is for all people, what does it mean ‘see’ God’s salvation realized in our own world today, not just the world that existed on that first Christmas, some 2,000 years ago?
To put the question in John’s own language, what does it mean for us to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ today? How can we ‘make straight paths for him’ in our time, in our own lives, and in our own celebration of Christmas?
…A BAPTISM OF REPENTANCE
“If you want to get to Christmas, you have to go through John” (Fred Craddock). The preaching of John not only points us to Jesus, but John gets the world ready for Jesus because John helps us ‘see’ and ‘understand’ how God’s salvation begins in the world.
God’s salvation begins when we begin to pay close attention to what is ‘crooked’ in our world (and in our lives too) that needs to be made ‘straight’ and to what feels so ‘rough’ that it needs to be made ‘smooth’. The word John uses for making spiritual preparation for God’s salvation is the word ‘repentance’. John came preaching ‘a baptism of repentance’ because ‘repentance’ is the way that goes through the heart of everyone, because only our hearts can God’s salvation be fully released into the whole world. Repentance is important for the Christmas story, because it is only through ‘repentance’, that is the turn away from our own sins and limitations, that we turn toward the hope of God’s universal, saving love.
My favorite story that taught me what our repentance means, comes from when my friend and I were riding in my car, and we entered a very narrow gate into a small village. As we were about the turn through that gate, a old, dilapidated pick-up meet us head on. We stopped. The pick-up stopped. We didn’t move. The pickup didn’t move. There were three long-haired hippies in the truck. They just sat there. I wanted to back up, but my friend reminded me that we were there first. I thought there might be some road rage, or something. But after what seemed an hour went by in a minute or so, one of the fellows stuck his head out the window and politely asked: “Would you guy minds backing up? Our truck doesn’t have any reverse.”
What ‘repentance’ means is that God ‘does not have a reverse.’ God doesn’t have any reverse just like time can’t be reversed and truth can’t be reversed. Time is time and truth is truth. You have to make a friend of time, just like you have to learn to live the truth. There is no reverse. There is no other option for this world. When you see yourself on the wrong side of truth and time, you have to turn.
What we need to understand about John’s preaching of repentance, is that John is not preaching ‘repentance’ to make us ashamed of ourselves, to make us feel guilty, or to force us to do only what God wants us to do. This is not what biblical repentance means. You can feel sorry about something and ashamed, but still not change. Repentance is about ‘change’ and ‘turning’ toward God’s healing, not toward more hurt.
Repentance means that we get real with what is real and we come to accept what is true about life, about God, and about us. God’s salvation comes to us in our lives, when we make the move toward the truth. Through the Word, through the prophet and the preacher, through the Holy Spirit, and through the message of truth, when we see, hear, and understand what is real, and we turn toward the truth, the ‘truth… sets us free’. As Derek Flood says, repentance is God’s way of healing and saving because repentance is how we acknowledge ‘what we didn’t know before…and how we open ourselves up new, fresh, and deeper ways of knowing’ the truth. “Repentance is how we turn from self-destruction toward the life God offers. Repentance is how we participate in the salvation God gives.
…THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS
When we talk about repentance, real, true, biblical repentance, we must always keep in mind is where repentance is going. Repentance is going where the Bible is going and it is going where God’s salvation is going, as it is revealed universally and ‘once and for all’ through Jesus Christ.
Quoting Derek Flood’s ‘The Healing Gospel’ once more, Flood reminds us that ‘Our repentance is in response to God’s love, not the condition for it.’ His point goes all the way back to Augustine, one of the first theologians of the church who wrote: “Our being reconciled through the Son, is not in order that the Father, then hating, might begin to love us.” No God already loves us. God in his love is what is calling us to repent so we will turn our hearts toward God and his loving truth. (From: Flood, Derek. Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross (p. 27). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Isn’t this what John tells us when he says it is the preaching of the ‘baptism of repentance’ that releases the ‘forgiveness of sins’ into our lives, here and now? God’s salvation always begins with the ‘repentance’ of sin because only repentance prepares us to know the true God of love, who has revealed himself to the whole world, just so that he can forgive us from the destructive and disastrous results of our own sins.
When I was in college, fellow student Randy Kilby, now deceased, told us one of the most important stories I’ve ever heard about understanding what God wants to do for us, then and now. He told a story about two siblings, Tommy and Susie, who went to spend the summer with their grandmother on the farm. They loved to spend time with Grandma on the farm, and this summer started out great, but then something bad happened that almost spoiled it all. Tommy was skipping rocks on the farm pond and accidently killed one of Grandma’s prize winning ducks.
Tommy was afraid to tell his Grandma about it, so he kept it a secret. He thought it was a secret, until one evening, after supper, his sister Susie informed Tommy that she had seen him kill that duck and that she was going to tell Grandma, unless he did her chores, as well as, his own. Tommy agreed and went through week after week, miserably doing whatever his sister wanted. “If you don’t do this, I’ll tell Grandma.”
Finally, it was the final week of the summer, and Tommy was tried of being enslaved to his sister’s beck and call. He finally went to his Grandma to tell her the truth; that he had killed her duck. When he was prepared to have Grandma scold him, instead Grandma told him how she had seen him, because she was getting her clothes in off the clothesline. She said she also saw how he lived under his sisters’ wishes, and he was just hoping and waiting for him to come and to admit his mistake, so that she could forgive him and set him free.
As Randy finished that story, we all understood what the story meant, because we’ve all been there. We’ve all enslaved ourselves by refusing to admit our failures, mistakes or sins. We’ve all allowed sin to enslave us, when all it would take to set us free, would be to turn toward the God who came into the world to set us free through the love he gave to us all through Jesus Christ.
This is what Christmas means; really means. Christmas is about the only faith that could ever really matter to everyone, coming into the world. It is a faith that comes to see the truth, the greatest truth, God’s truth that through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has offered us a way to see the salvation that only love can bring. It is a salvation that comes from the God of loves and waits for us to turn our hearts toward the love that has ‘first loved us’.
When we see what God’s sees, when God loves, then we all will see God’s salvation.’ Amen.
No comments :
Post a Comment