What does God want?
Advent 2
Fr. Tim Nunez
On our very last weekend of seminary, Meg asked me to get the kids out of her way while she finalized packing. I decided to we’d go see Lookout Mountain, which was only 45 minutes away yet something we had not done in those three years, despite it being one of the main attractions in the area as it “looks out” over Chattanooga and the Tennessee River and it has a lot of history.
We did and it was fine. And we started home.
Dad wanted to see one other site that day. Covenant College also sits up on Lookout Mountain, which is really just a long sliver of the Cumberland Plateau, as all of the “mountains” in that part of Tennessee are. For years we could see it up on the mountain from I-24 in the valley, and I thought it would be cool to see it up close. It was. We just drove around it for a few minutes, admired the view, no big deal. That’s when the trouble started.
I just assumed I could continue down that road and we’d come to a road that would drop us down to the valley where we could pick up I-24 and go home. The simple thing would have been to ask directions, or look at a map. (I didn’t have a cell phone and smart phones weren’t invented yet.) But no, it became a sojourn, a quest, with three young children getting past their supper time.
We drove and we drove until we came to a crossroad. It had a little restaurant. I asked for directions but the woman had never heard of Sewanee. But she told me that, yes, I could take that road down off the mountain. When we came into Trenton, Georgia, we had gone a long way and we were actually farther from home. I felt like Moses in the wilderness and the kids sounded like the 12 tribes of Israel crying out for water and food.
There was only one thing to do, one way to go after a quick stop at McDonalds and an apologetic call to Meg who was starting to worry. We picked up I-59 and backtracked almost all the way back to Chattanooga to I-24 and go home.
All of that is to illustrate how easily we can think we are going the right way, we can assume we are making reasonable decisions and feel like we are making great time and great progress – but later find we are going the wrong way.
The Sadducees and Pharisees each thought they were following faithful paths to honor God. The Sadducees were doing their best to work with the Romans to allow Israel to live their lives according to their faith. The Pharisees saw strict observance of the Law, or at least the parts they saw as important, and regulating the people. They know better.
But both were missing the fullness of God’s will for his people as expressed in the Law and the prophets, and also their lived experience and history. This included a heart and care for God’s people, especially the widows, the orphans and the poor.
There is a special urgency to John’s preaching because he knows that a particular moment is coming. He is a hinge figure in a hinge moment as we shift from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. He looks like a prophet of old, specifically described just like Elijah, and he sounds like a prophet of old as he is quoting Isaiah. And he is performing a baptism of repentance to help people who know they are on the wrong road get back to the right one, even and especially if it means backtracking to the point where they went wrong.
Let me just pause here to note that John’s message and baptism would and should have had universal appeal to anyone who is wise and thoughtful enough to recognize the ways in which one is falling short. That’s especially true when you feel like things aren’t going well and you really want that fresh start. That’s good as far as it goes.
And it is a necessary step to receiving Jesus. In other words, if you’re cruising down the wrong road with no sense of being lost, you’re not going to be looking for a better way and you’re not going to embrace THE Way.
But John’s baptism isn’t enough. Nor is one’s identity as “one of Abraham’s children” enough. They’ve gotten that whole idea of being the “Chosen People” wrong. Everyone who is relying on heritage and tradition have got it wrong and need to repent of that as well. “My grandparents were active in the church” won’t cut it.
John is just preparing the way. His baptism is a redirect for receiving Jesus who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire. While it’s necessary for us to make that turn, to repent and ask forgiveness, that’s just preparing us to receive Christ.
That is all present when we baptize someone. We baptize using water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then we anoint the person with oil and say, “You are sealed by the power of the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” This a very wonderful thing to say and a very wonderful thing to hear and a most wonderful thing to have done!
Our lives in the Spirit are like a big knotted ball of Christmas lights. You have to plug it in to see which strands and bulbs are good and which need work. You’ve got to plug it in first.
But understand what Jesus means to do with us. He means to use preserve the good wheat and use that fire of Pentecost burn away anything and everything that is chaff.
The Kingdom of God is at hand, it has arrived in him. Confronted with Jesus, confronted with his invitation, we are confronted with the simple fact that things in our lives that are not of God cannot come into his Kingdom. Jesus has come to accomplish that separation for us – saving us from those unholy things that are to be cast aside and calling us at our very highest and best into his Kingdom.
We’ve got to turn toward that, no matter how far we’ve run in the wrong direction. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight by asking that simple question, what does God want? Jesus forces that issue because he is here, he is Emmanuel, “God is with us.”
AMEN