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Second Sunday in Advent

For a good portion of the decade of the 90s I commuted, most days, to New York City.  My office, at that point, was on Fifth Avenue – walking distance from Penn Station – so twice a day, in the morning and the evening, I would navigate the 12 or 13 blocks on foot. 

If you’ve spent any time in Manhattan, you know that walking its streets can be an interesting, occasionally amusing and once in a while even frightening experience. 

At times, there are so many cabs that you find yourself thinking that there must be some kind of ordinance that allows only cars painted yellow to ride on the streets.  At other times – particularly this time of year – the sidewalks and crosswalks are so crowded that you need to employ the same strategy that you use when driving on New Jersey highways during rush hour.  You need to get up to the speed of the traffic (foot traffic in this case) and keep pace, or you’re likely to get yourself trampled.

Anyhow, one of the more interesting characters that I remember, when I think back to the daily dramas that unfolded during my walks through the streets of Manhattan, is the messenger.  The anonymous man – or once in a great while a woman – in bicycle shorts and helmet with a bag on his back, sitting astride a well-worn bike and peddling from building to building, oblivious to the traffic around him and, as often as not, oblivious to the color of the traffic lights as well.

Messengers are, in fact, an integral part of the commercial enterprise that makes Manhattan the kind of place that it is.  They make it possible for confidential documents – the kind that no one wants to expose to the infinitely public arena of the Internet – to be transmitted quickly and efficiently from one law firm, investment firm or bank to another.

Messengers are sometimes totally uninvolved.  They can be completely oblivious to the content of the message they bring.  In fact, the language associated with the transaction, the “I’ll just messenger it over to you,” implies anonymity on the part of the messenger and presumes detachment from the nature, or the importance, of the parcel or message being delivered.  Divorce decree or hostile takeover communiqué, it’s all the same to the messenger. 

On the other hand, messengers can sometimes take their jobs very personally.  Perhaps you remember, as I do, the ending of the movie Cast Away when Chuck Noland, a FEDEX executive played by Tom Hanks, personally delivers a package that spent four years with him on an island somewhere in the Pacific, leaving a note suggesting that the package actually kept him alive. 

While being stranded on an island is a bit extreme, messengers do often take great risk in order to get the message delivered.  One of the more famous such instances would undoubtedly be the story of the unnamed Greek soldier who, in 490 BC, ran 26 miles from a battle at Marathon to Athens to report a victory.  This messenger, as the legend suggests, delivered the good news, then fell over and died of exhaustion.

Messengers can also put others at risk – they can be in such a hurry that they run people over – particularly pedestrians who either fail to see them or, worse, choose to ignore them.  A messenger accident actually put a colleague of mine in the hospital.  She made the mistake of presuming he was going to stop, and paid for that presumption with what turned out to be a broken collar bone and with what the EMTs called “multiple contusions.”  Ouch.

And speaking of stopping, another characteristic of messengers that stands out in my mind is that you can almost never stop them.  Many actually ride fixed-gear bicycles that are made for riding on a track – bicycles that do not allow the rider to coast and, more often than not, have no brakes.   Even those messengers that do not ride such bikes often possess that same predisposition – an unwillingness to allow obstacles, either human or vehicular, to stand in their way.

Being a messenger, in short, can be hard, it can be frustrating, and it can be downright dangerous.  In my limited experience – I’ve never really gotten to know a messenger, other than in some brief conversations on elevators in tall buildings – they are generally a pretty unorthodox bunch, possessed with some quirky but nonetheless admirable qualities.   To summarize:

• A good messenger doesn’t particularly care what people think of him, and doesn’t mind standing out in a crowd – think bicycle shoes and a helmet in the midst of button-down shirts and neatly knotted ties;
• He is fearless – willing to take risk and possibly even put others at risk in order to reach his goal;
• And he has a clear sense of the purpose of his mission – one that doesn’t allow stopping or even coasting along the way.

On this second Sunday in Advent, our texts point us directly to a messenger.  A messenger who, interestingly enough, is not so different from the ones we’ve been talking about.  I’m referring, of course, to John the Baptist – the one whose life and message were predicted by the Prophet Malachi and described in some detail by Luke.

John, as Luke and the other Gospel writers describe him, was what a modern teenager would most likely call a “strange dude.”  He lived in the desert, essentially as a hermit, until he was roughly 30 years old, when he emerged, scraggly and unkempt, proclaiming the judgment of God and the need for repentance.

John’s message included calling his listeners to practice ethical behavior.  Luke later quotes him as saying “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.”  He also called tax collectors to collect no more than was lawful and called soldiers to be content with their army rations and refrain from preying on helpless civilians.

This kind of teaching turned out to be risky for John.  So risky, in fact, that he ended up getting himself beheaded, on the orders of Herod, who John criticized for sleeping with his brother's wife.  Clearly, John was unfazed by the prospect of speaking the truth to those in power.

But it was because of John’s role as messenger that we remember him during this Advent season.  It is why we think of him as the one who prepared the way.   It is why he is remembered as the one who was, in the words of the Prophet Isaiah – quoted in our text – “crying out in the wilderness” and “making his path straight.”

If we think about it, John possessed essentially the same qualities that we found in effective present-day messengers. 

• He didn’t care what people thought of him – one can only imagine the sight of him, but he was unconventional to be sure;
• He was fearless – willing to take risk, ultimately to the point of his death – and unwilling to coast or be stopped;
• And he had a singular sense of purpose – to preach reform and repentance and to prepare the way for the Messiah to come.

If you were going to place him in a present-day messenger role, you could easily picture him, hair flowing in the wind, barreling down Fifth Avenue – or Bridgeboro Street, for that matter, astride a track bike, ignoring the risk of traffic around him.

It is important to note that the beginning of our text from Luke’s Gospel, with all of its hard-to-pronounce names, is a virtual who’s who of important persons.  There are governors and kings, even a high priest.  Luke names all of these dignitaries in order to provide the context for his words.   The “word of God,” however, is not revealed to these important figures.  The word is revealed, instead, to a messenger – the ascetic, previously unknown, wilderness prophet John the Baptist.

And the word that is revealed, the whole purpose of the messenger’s work – the crux of the message – is the fact that “all flesh” will see the salvation of God.

Salvation for all is the clear and distinct purpose of John’s baptism of repentance.  It is the clear and distinct message he carries as he preaches and teaches and baptizes in the River Jordan.

The emphasis of this message is God’s everlasting mercy; it is God reaching out to all people, making all things new and right. This passage tells us that God is at work, that God entered into history in a decisive way in Jesus, and that, because of him, things will never be the same again.

This is the message that caused John to stand out in the crowd and risk his life and prepare the way.  John held this vision out there for others to see.  He issued a challenge for them, and called for repentance.

 But John is not just a messenger who lived and died 2000 years ago.  He is also an appropriate model for the church, today, as it seeks to recover its prophetic voice in a world desperately in need of that voice.

The situation in Israel in the First Century called for a messenger like John.  His was a message that needed to be heard.  The Messiah whose coming he foretold was desperately needed.  People longed for his coming.

And because God’s redemptive work is still unfinished, because the salvation of “all flesh” has not yet been realized, John’s message is just as relevant today as it was when it was first proclaimed.  The good news is not just the story of what God has done through Jesus in the past, but also what God is still in the process of doing.

“All flesh” is an inclusive concept.  In includes you and me, to be sure, but it also includes people who are not usually present in our church or any other church.

So if all flesh is to see the salvation of God, then we, who have seen that salvation, have work to do.  If we believe that through the messenger, John the Baptist, God was at work putting everything together to bring salvation to all flesh, then we too must be messengers, following John’s example.

Like John, and, coincidentally, like the messengers on Fifth Avenue, we need to be prepared to:

• Stand out, rather than conform to the expectations of those around us;
• Take risk – which for a local church generally means a willingness to do things differently than we have in the past, and a willingness to, like John, speak the truth to those in power;
• And be steadfast and persistent in our proclamation of the good news of God’s inclusive, unconditional love – for all people.

May God help us, on this Advent Sunday, as we commit ourselves to finding new ways to follow John’s example in this community.

                                                                                                AMEN