Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

Where were you when JFK was shot? I won’t tell you where I was—though I was alive at the time—because then you would all tease me mercilessly during coffee hour for being such a youngster. Let’s just say that my only recollection is from watching the Zapruder films over the last 30 or so years, and leave it at that. But I do remember the moon landing, and Nixon’s resignation—I actually watched that on television. And the Space Shuttle explosions—both of them—and the fall of the Berlin wall, and Tiananmen Square, and the funeral of Princess Diana, and of course, the terrors of September 11, 2001, the Asian Tsunami, and the Hurricanes of 2005.

I wasn’t actually at any of those things of course, but I know about them through television. It’s how my generation marks time. I can only imagine how my children’s children will remember time, what historical markers they will count as significant.

My generation, and all generations that follow mine now will live in a post-911 world. That’s what it will always be, until something else comes along to mark time. The world of he ancients was no different in some respects:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

Whew! Scintillating, eh? Thanks, for a wonderfully exciting beginning to the reading there, Luke. Why on earth would the hearers of the day, much less us reading hundreds of years later care one whit about who rules whom? Were the editors completely asleep when they got to this part? What on earth could this possibly mean?

Except…what if the author is writing in code again? They did that sometimes, you know. If I said to you “Madeleine Albright ”, it will mean something completely different than if I say “Condoleezza Rice”. They are both women, both have served as Secretary of State, but they are different enough that one means one political party was in power, and one means another party altogether.

So perhaps the writer is speaking in code to us: Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Phillip, Lysanius, Annas, Caiaphas. By the time we modern hearers get to Herod, we begin to get the picture , don’t we? We may not know much about those last four guys, but we sure do recognize Pilate and Herod, and what we know about them is not good.

So it turns out, in fact that these first couple of verses are important in that they set the scene for what happens next. What happens next is what happens every Advent: a prophet enters the picture. Some years we get the fun descriptive passages about John, this wild desert-dwelling man who ate locust and wild honey, who lived on the edge of propriety and went around spouting a call to repentance. A friend of mine once had his teenage son burst into the sanctuary, bearing the long hair and scruffy old clothes of a street person, at the critical moment of the sermon. The son came up the aisle loudly proclaiming the words of John, and for a moment there, he was no longer Jeremy, who worked at Allison’s before-school daycare program, but a real, live prophet.

A real, live prophet. Would we know one if we saw one? We would like to think that in our technocratic age, where acts of terror are transported electronically, instantaneously across the globe, and people who have never ever been to New York City become transfixed at the images of her skyline, changed forever, we’d like to think that if there is a prophet, we’ve seen her face on our wide flat screens, or we’ve heard his words through our ear buds as we do our thirty minutes on the elliptical.

But first maybe we’d have to know what a prophet looks like, or sounds like. What is a prophet, anyway? Simply put, a prophet proclaims the reign of God, and reminds the world that God keeps God’s promises. And a prophet does this not by telling the future, but by pointing out—shedding light—on the present. Because the promise-keeping of a God of grace is not some far off future event, some apocalyptic deliverance, but is something God does here and now. And so for this reason, Luke reminds the readers (and hearers) that John came to a people right where they were, under the thumb of the likes of Pontius and Herod, and John proclaimed a new world order.

The reason that we are unable to name the top ten prophets of our day is not that they aren’t out there, but is because the powers, by definition, are resistant to prophesy. The system of the powers says that Christmas starts as soon as the red and green decorations go up in Kohl’s (which this year at the Kohl’s in Sussex was in September, by the way), and the credit cards come out of their protective sleeves in our wallets.

The system says that Peace on Earth starts with “door busters” and parades, with Rudolph and a “jolly happy soul” and inflatable lawn decorations. The system says that sleeping outside in the cold is not a practice in solidarity with those who have nowhere else to sleep this week, but is a way to get in line for a ridiculously cheap widget, and something we are lucky enough to do for fun. I thought this year, why are there cameras pointed at people waiting in the cold in the dead of night for a Wii, but no cameras pointed at the homeless people sleeping in the cold in the dead of night in cardboard boxes? Then I remembered: The camera pointed at cardboard boxes is prophesy. And the powers, by definition, are resistant to prophesy.

So into this time of oppressive rule, when everyone lived under the thumb of Tiberius, and others just like him, the word of the Lord came to a man named John, the son of Zechariah, and the word was like the word that comes to every true prophet: God keeps God’s promises. “Shine a light on what is happening, make everyone understand that a new rule will be kept, a rule of hope, and peace, and joy, and love.” And because the people had heard this truth before, proclaimed by another prophet (Isaiah), John used the words that every one hearing his voice already knew:

'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 be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’

Near where we live there are new subdivisions springing up everywhere it seems. The construction sites are quiet now that it is so cold, but I know that in spring it will begin again, and the air will be filled with the sounds of earth-moving equipment. It’s noisy dirty work, done with heavy machinery. When I think of the promise of valleys filled and mountains and hills made low, and crooked paths transformed into straight roads, I can’t help but wonder what heavy equipment God uses for such work.

And if I think about it long enough, I realize that we are God’s heavy machinery. We are the prophets, we are the priests, we are the care-takers, we are the stewards, we are the ones who must proclaim repentance and the day of salvation—God really doesn’t have any other equipment than the church. God could send angels to shed light on the truth, to help the world understand that the promised peace and redemption have not slipped God’s mind, but God has not. We are charged with the proclamation of God’s new world order—and if we’re doing it right, the powers will not like it. The system does not like it when peace is proclaimed in the middle of a perfectly nice war. You can bet Tiberius was not happy to hear about a new rule of life, any more than Herod celebrated the birth of the newborn King, or Pilate was a fan of the King of the Jews.

“Let there be peace on earth” is a dangerous, subversive tune. It’s a song of resistance, don’t let the pretty tune fool you. “Let it begin with me” can get you hurt. Killed, even.

'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 be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’

And no ruler, past, present, or future, can stop it.

Thanks be to God.