“God’s anonymous: the crowds”
Luke 3:7
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Have you ever heard of William J. Walker? Probably not. But as a former Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Commanding General of D.C.’s National Guard, he now serves as the 38th Sergeant at Arms of the United States House of Representatives, a post he’s held since April of this year.
And among his many responsibilities, like serving as the chief law enforcement officer of the House and ensuring the safety and security of the members of Congress as well as all who come to visit there, it’s his ceremonial duty, at every State of the Union address, to announce first the Supreme Court, then the president’s cabinet, and finally the president himself with the so-familiar words: “Mister (or Madam) Speaker, the President of the United States!” And for that one brief moment, the eyes of the world are on that Sergeant at Arms.
Then what? As the president steps forward to the roar of the crowd, he gets out of the way, for someone of higher rank has come.
So it was in the words of our text, from the book of Luke chapter 3. I’ll start at verse 1: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God”’” (Luke 3:1-6).
Now before I say anything more, we first have to ask, “Just who was this man named, ‘John the Baptist’?” After all, there are a number of things we do know about him, and most all of them are pretty strange.
For example, the Bible says that when he was conceived, his parents were old and his mother was barren. They couldn’t have a son. Yet it was to them that the angel Gabriel came to say, “You will bear a son and you will name him John” (Luke 1:13).
And when he was barely six months along in his mother’s womb, Mary came to visit, pregnant with Jesus Christ. And just as soon as Elizabeth heard her call out her name, John leaped for joy in his mother’s womb.
And when he grew, the Lord called him to preach, to prepare the way for the Lord. And as people came from all across the country to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins, he said to those who collected taxes, “Don’t collect any more than you should collect.” To the Pharisees he said, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” And to the people he said, “Repent for the kingdom of God is near.”
John was a most unusual man who was given a most unusual command--to prepare the way for the Lord. It wasn’t easy. He likely had far more enemies than friends.
But it didn’t matter, for he was sent to prepare the way for the Lord, and prepare the way he did. And he did it so well that Jesus would later say, “What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind? I tell you: among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.”
If he were alive today, I can’t help but wonder what he’d say. For even though times have changed so much since the first century, God’s Word is still the same. So whoever we are and whatever we do, we too are driven out to the Jordan to hear him say: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.”
Imagine for a moment, that you’re out on a hike on a beautiful spring day. And as you walk along, surrounded by nature on all sides, you come to a creek and its running water.
But something’s wrong. As you get a little closer, you find that someone’s dumped trash into that river and, judging by all the empty bottles and cans, it’s been there for quite awhile. There’s even an ugly film on top of the water.
So what do you do? You can’t just leave it like that, so you stoop down and begin to gather up some of that trash.
And about an hour later, you begin to make a difference. So you sit back, rest for a moment, then decide to come back another day until it’s really clean. But that’s okay, for it’s a project that has to be done.
But when you come back the next day, you see there’s even more trash than there was before. Somehow it grew even worse overnight.
So where did it all come from? You follow the creek upstream.
And that’s when you find that a huge garbage dump that’s been there for years is emptying into that stream. And no matter how much you try to clean it up, there will always be more and more and more.
Sin is just like that. For as Paul once wrote to the Romans: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). And Jesus said in the book of Matthew, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, theft, lying and slander. These are the things that defile a man” (Matthew 15:19-20).
Or as another author put it: “Sin will take you farther than you ever expected to go, keep you longer than you ever intended to stay, and cost you more than you ever expected to pay.”
So it’s no wonder that John said, “Prepare the way of the Lord! Repent, for the kingdom of God is near!”
What does it mean to repent? Imagine a man walking in one direction when he suddenly realizes that he’s walking in the wrong direction. So he stops, turns around, then starts walking in the new direction. It’s a quick and simple process really--he realizes...he stops...and then he turns.
But imagine if someone was riding a bicycle also in the wrong direction, so he too stops and turns and begins cycling in the new direction. But he can’t turn around quite as quickly as the one who was walking--it’s a longer process. For when he stops and turns, depending on his speed, it might take some time. And it takes longer to get back up to full speed in the new direction.
The same is true for a man in a car. In fact, he might even have to go out of his way to get back on track. And the same is true for a man in a speedboat. He too has to slow down, turn around and come back.
Now imagine a supertanker. It could take him miles to slow the ship down enough to even begin to make that turn, taking him a long way from his intended course, and taking even longer to get up to full speed in the new direction.
And repentance is just like that. Some sins are small and easy. We simply stop and walk the other way. And some sins, like a bicycle, or like a car or a speedboat, are a little more difficult. It takes even longer to stop and turn the other way.
But like a supertanker, some sins are enormous. They may be so deeply ingrained in us, so much a part of us, that we hardly even recognize them as sins. Still God works patiently with us, slowing us down, so He can bring us through the turn and into a new direction, where He can bring us up to full speed again.
And that’s the message of Advent and the message of John crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way for the Lord! Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.”
A thousand years ago, back in the Middle Ages, the church told the story of a woman who died and went to heaven. But before she was allowed to go inside, she was given a mission—to find the one, earthly thing that was most precious to God.
So, as the story goes, she wandered the earth, always searching, and always asking, “What does God desire the most?”
One day she met a man who was about to be martyred for his faith. With remarkable Christian courage, even as he was tortured and murdered, he refused to deny his Savior. So as he died, she scooped up some grains of sand that were stained with his martyr’s blood.
But as she brought those grains of sand to heaven, she found that the blood of martyrs was truly precious, but it wasn’t what the Lord wanted the most. So, reluctantly, she began to wander again.
And as time passed, she tried again and again, but still couldn’t find what the Lord wanted the most. She brought some coins a widow had given to the poor, some torn and wrinkled pages of a Bible once used by a minister, and dust from the shoes of a missionary who served in a foreign land. But none of them was what heaven wanted the most.
Until one day she saw a boy playing with his younger sister by a fountain. And as the two sat together, a man suddenly rode up on a horse and fiercely reigned him in. The little girl would have been trampled to death had the boy not risked his own life to push her out of the way. And as the man watched the boy comfort his sister, he bent down to drink from the fountain.
But as he did, he saw the reflection of his own face, a face hardened by countless past and present sins, a face that cared for no one and no thing. Then, overcome by his sins, tears of repentance began to flow down his face.
Silently and carefully, the woman crept up behind him and caught one of those tears. And holding it gently in her hands, she hurried to heaven. And as she approached with that tear of repentance, she found that that was the one thing the Lord desired the most.
And it’s still what the Lord desires the most. For as John once proclaimed in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord! Repent, for the kingdom of God is near!”
We thank You, dear Father, for the message once proclaimed by John the Baptist. Grant that we too may repent of our sins and find forgiveness, as we long for Christmas to come. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen