December 6, Second Sunday of Advent — Rev. Kim Hinrichs
December 7th, 2009“Preparing A Way”
Luke 1: 59-79 (text at end of sermon)
One day last week my nine-year-old daughter had a play date with a friend. The next day, I got a call from the friend’s mother while I was at work. She said, “I just wanted to tell you something that Claire said yesterday.” I said “Oh, no… what did she do?” as my heart sank.
But Julie said, “Oh no, it’s nothing like that, don’t worry. What happened was that I was driving the two of them in my car, and they were talking in the back seat, not realizing that I was listening.
Claire said to Sophia, ‘I’m not sure if I believe in Santa Claus anymore, so I made up a test. I wrote down my Christmas wish list on a little piece of paper, and stuck it in a book that we never read anymore in my sister’s bookcase. No one will ever find it. And then I’ll know: if I get some of the presents that are on that list, I’ll know Santa is real. And if I don’t, then I’ll know that Santa is just my parents.”
She’s a 9-year-old, on the fence about her belief. She is putting her faith to the test, wanting to believe yet feeling it couldn’t possibly be true, that she should outgrow this childish belief in magical reality. I have since ransacked that bookcase but I haven’t yet found the piece of paper!
It strikes me that this is the way many of us are about the Christ himself during the season of Advent. We’re circumspect. We’re busy. Another Christmas—time to get out the Christmas lights, bake the cookies, do the shopping, go to a party or two, be nice to seldom-seen relatives. We go through the motions. Yes, for people of faith there may be this underlying suggestion that there is something more… a faint glimmer of something potent and life-changing beneath our to-do lists. Something about Christ.
I wonder if we sometimes feel, however, that our belief in Christ is somehow naïve—a relic of a younger time in our lives when belief in magical things was easier. But perhaps we want to believe—we want to believe it’s still true. I wonder how many of us do what Claire did, and hide an imaginary wish list away in a forgotten book, testing God to reveal Godself to us. We shut out the awesome revelation of God in human flesh, because we have Christmas lights to hang. Or perhaps there are more internal reasons why we push the arrival of Christ to the outer reaches of consciousness. It’s scary. We’re upholding a fair amount of false thinking in our consciousness—rationalizations and justifications of why we keep living in diminished ways, reasons for us not to reach for the fullest potential of who we are or what we can do to serve the world. The arrival of Christ might cause us to change our ways.
Our text today centers on the birth of a baby whose arrival will have cosmic significance. No, it’s not the birth of Jesus—not yet—but the birth of John the Baptist, whose story mirrors that of Jesus in rhetorically significant ways. An angel of the Lord has come to announce a very special birth. The parent offers a beautiful song praising the Lord in response—the famous Magnificat from Mary precedes our text by just a few verses, while this one—Zechariah’s song of praise upon the birth of his son John—is known as the “Benedictus.” The baby born is immediately understood as a fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel. Zechariah’s song speaks of the long history of the Israelite people through the Old Testament and their relationship with a God who has promised them deliverance. This is a parallel story to the birth of Christ, but this baby boy comes first. John is a liminal figure—a Jew who embodies both the promise of the Hebrew scriptures and the fulfillment of them by preparing the way for the Christ who follows him.
This passage comes at a time when Israel suffered under the domination of Rome, and powerful rulers like Herod issued edicts that affected the lives of everyday commoners—commoners like Elizabeth and Zechariah, like Mary and Joseph. In fact, the roman emperor Ceasar Augustus has just issued a ruling that the conquered people of Israel be registered by name and city with the occupying government.
Zechariah’s benedictus is a prayer for a world “turned right-side-up,” in a time when the world was pretty certainly upside-down. This is the old, old song of a people who had been singing God’s promises for generations, through struggle, despair, disappointment and hope. His song links the new baby prophet to the long history of his people with the hope that this, finally, may be the fulfillment of God’s promises.
Now what I’d like to bring our attention to is the second half of this benedictus. The first half is a thanksgiving to God for all the good that he has done. But the form changes at verse 74, and becomes a supplication: a specific request of God’s blessing. What does Zechariah ask for, in this high moment of redemptive promise?
He says, “grant us, that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve [the Lord] without fear…”
When I first read this passage, that line jumped off the page for me. It strikes me for 2 reasons: first, it speaks of “being rescued from the hands of our enemies,” but there is no war that has just been fought, no conflict that has just been won. All that has happened is that a baby has been born. As with the birth of Jesus, we see the striking juxtaposition of something as enormous as the redemption of humankind next to, contained within, the small, humble, vulnerability of a newborn baby. There is a sense of cosmic redemption that John portends.
The second thing that strikes me is to notice what Zechariah asks of God at this important moment. Does he ask for Israel to be victorious? Does he ask for the people to be spared hardship and disease? Does he ask for wealth and ease? No. His request is “that we may serve the Lord without fear.” It is so compelling to me that this—this internal, psychological state—is what is identified as primary. Now fear is mentioned throughout the Old and New Testaments, but especially so in the gospel of Luke. When the angels arrive to give a special communication, they begin by saying “Fear not.” At other times, when the realm of God is communicated to a gathered people, their response is to run away in fear. Remember the ending of the gospel of Mark, when two of the disciples glimpse the empty tomb that indicates Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and they run away, because they were afraid.
Fear is a barrier that prohibits our connection with God. I think we all carry it with us to greater and lesser degrees. And in those times when we glimpse the inbreaking, world-turning-upside-down presence of God in our reality, we sometimes want to shove it away in fear. We sometimes want to stash it away in a forgotten book and bury this knowledge.
Evidently it was letting go of this kind of fear that John made possible for his people. The baptisms that he would go on to perform forgave the people of their sins, embracing them in the loving and open arms of salvation. With this “redemption,” this being received wholeheartedly into the loving grace of God’s activity, they could then be freed “to serve the Lord without fear.” Not just to “live without fear” and not just to “serve the Lord,” but to “serve the Lord without fear.” Zechariah suggests that this is the highest goal of spiritual growth.
Our Swedenborgian understanding is that John the Baptist was sent before the Lord because baptism represented purification from evils and falsities, and also regeneration by means of the Word. Unless this purification had preceded, the Lord could not have manifested Himself. He could not have been present with a nation that was mired in falsities and evil. Unless that nation had been prepared for the reception of the Lord by the purification from falsities and evils by baptism, it would have been destroyed by diseases of every kind by the presence of the Divine Itself. (AC 724.7)
The Lord’s spirit cannot enter except where the way is prepared by humility and obedience to truth from the Word.
It is easy to miss the Advent message of repentance. But this is a penitential season, and that was the purpose of John the Baptist. John came to baptize the people, “to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.” Some of us might recoil at these traditional Christian words of “salvation” and “forgiveness of sins.” But what they mean is a cleansing and purifying of that which contorts us, distorts us, distracts us, and keeps us from living in harmony with God and one another. The message of this text is that cleansing away the falsities we carry around in our hearts is what will allow us to serve the Lord without fear.
So I invite you to do three things this Advent season.
First, believe. Believe in the presence of embodied love in this upside-down, messed up world. Look for it in the weak and vulnerable places. Don’t sit on the fence like a 9-year-old testing her belief in Santa Claus. Christ is real! Love is here!
Second, purify your heart. What obstacles must be removed in order for us to receive the Lord? As Diane Bergant suggests, “As individuals, we might have to overcome deep-seated resentment, persistent fault-finding, unwillingness to forgive, dishonesty in our dealings with others, a bullying attitude. As a society we might have to dismantle unfair housing policies, employment disparity, economic injustice, racial and ethnic biases.” What rationalizations and justifications within your own mind need to be cleansed and washed away so that your heart might be clear?
Third, after doing the first two, serve the Lord without fear. Incline yourself to moving in the world in accordance with God’s ways: helping others, including others, making healthy space, nurturing healthy relationships, righting injustice…and not being surprised or dismayed when we glimpse the real presence of God in our midst.
The kingdom of heaven is always at hand. The Lord stands at the door, always ready to enter. Our part is to open the door, to prepare a way. Amen.
Luke 1:59-79
On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him after his father Zechariah, but his mother spoke up and said, “No! He is to be called John.” They said to her, “There is no one among your relatives who has that name.” Then they made signs to his father, to find out what he would like to name the child. He asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone’s astonishment he wrote, “His name is John.” Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue was loosed, and he began to speak, praising God. The neighbors were all filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things. Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, “What then is this child going to be?” For the Lord’s hand was with him.
His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us—to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
Swedenborg, Apocalypse Explained, 724.7
John the Baptist was sent before to prepare the people for the reception of the Lord by baptism, because baptism represented and signified purification from evils and falsities, and also regeneration by the Lord by means of the Word. Unless this representation had preceded, the Lord could not have manifested Himself and have taught and lived in Judea and in Jerusalem, since the Lord was the God of heaven and earth under a human form, and He could not have been present with a nation that was in mere falsities in respect to doctrine and in mere evils in respect to life; consequently unless that nation had been prepared for the reception of the Lord by a representation of purification from falsities and evils by baptism, it would have been destroyed by diseases of every kind by the presence of the Divine Itself; therefore this is what is signified by “lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” That this is so is well known in the spiritual world, for those there who are in falsities and evils are direfully tormented and spiritually die at the presence of the Lord.
