Luke 3:1-6
December 7, 2003
2 Advent C
Luke 3:1-6
December 7, 2003
Sixty-two years ago tomorrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood in a joint session of the congress of the United States and made a proclamation concerning today’s date in history. Referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he said that December 7th would forever be known as “a day of infamy.” December 7, 1941, happened to be a Sunday, just as it is this year.
However, on December 7th of this year, in a new and supposedly more sophisticated century, we have something in common with the people who made up America in that dark time, something far more ominous than a shared date. We are still a violent people who inhabit a violent world.
We continue to proclaim Jesus the Prince of Peace. We continue to quote his warning that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. We still maintain that he spoke the truth when he said that he is the way and the truth and the life. But we also continue to trust our violent ways over the example that he gave us. In so many ways we maintain the same priorities today as people did then. Belief in violence appears to be as alive today as it was when we entered World War II. Unless there is some place in the gospels where Jesus endorses violence as a way to peace that I’m not aware of, we have traded in his message for one that we think works better.
Each of us have seen endless commentaries pro and con concerning the war that we inaugurated in Iraq 2003. If you were asked how your religious beliefs influence your views on war, what would you say? The Pew Research Center, which does studies on religion and life, asked that very question in an opinion poll. Only 10 percent of Americans who were polled said that their religious beliefs had anything to do with their judgment in the matter, while 41 percent said that they formed their judgment based on what they saw on television, heard on the radio or read in the newspaper. That means that only 10 percent of those of us who come to churches, who read and profess faith in the Gospel and who worship God in the name of Jesus carry their faith from the sanctuary to the street or even into their own consciences. If that’s the case, how serious are we about or faith?
Today we read about getting the road ready for the Lord, about making a straight path, about filling the valleys and about leveling the hills. But what can any of this mean, if only 10 percent of us dare to give it meaning once we leave this place?
The story we hear today about John the Baptist takes place in a world where values were no less divided than they are today. Luke goes to great lengths to describe the worldly setting in which the events he narrates take place. He reminds us that John came into a world of emperors and governors and rulers and high priests. He came with his message in real time. What percentage of religious people then do you suppose turned to the governments of their day rather than the God of their lives for the source of truth and judgment? Apparently they were many. Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus himself died of natural causes, you know.
What are the valleys that lie between us and the truth that need to be filled? What are the hills or the crooked roads that prevent us from seeing the truth of God’s ways. As we listen to the gospel today with our hearts, can we deny that it is written for us? Can we deny that we do not have some stumbling blocks to be removed? And isn’t it also true that in our conversations, we at times fail to do the straightening, the filling and the leveling?
The John the Baptists of this world have never been very popular. Those who show sin for what it is do not win awards. Exposing it is off limits, because such preaching or even such thinking threatens treasured ways of life. Its roots run deep. Those who confront it are martyred in a variety of ways. John the Baptist was not the last of the murdered prophets. Ghandi spoke out against violence and attempted to level the hills that it created. He was murdered. Martin Luther King confronted violence against people of color and those in poverty. He was assassinated. The skeletons of prophets from a variety of ages and nations lie in graves across the globe but their spirits are more likely at peace than the spirits of those who killed them or even than those who kept quiet and let the violence continue.
John the Baptist did not remain quiet. He was called to make the crooked paths straight, and he did not shrink from that calling. We too have been called without the option of shrinking from the call. Remember, despite the billboard slogans, Christianity is not only about being saved. It is about saving. It is not only about having the road to God straightened. It is about straightening the road for those who walk behind us.
Like John the Baptist we have generations to come in our wake. We have people in our lives even now for whom the way of the Lord must be made ready. What do we show them to believe in? Do we give them the untruth that violence is of God? Do we give them the illusion that in the long run, it is the ways of the world that solve problems, or do we give them the truth? What do we as people of faith give them that the media and the governments of the world, including our own, do not give?
Of course the bottom line is that we cannot give what we do not have. The convictions we have in our hearts become the values that we convey. If we are convinced, as many appear to be, that the media is the best foundation for truth, if we are convinced that the government speaks the Christian way, because we are known as a Christian nation, then that is what we will convey in our conversations. That is the legacy that we will give our children. In other words, we will be doing nothing to make straight the path for the Lord.
We live in a conflicted society where we are exposed to contrary messages. The problem is that we position ourselves to hear the ways of the world on a far more regular basis than the ways of God. Certainly we are people of faith or we would not be here. But unless this faith is fed on a very regular basis, we will convert to the message of the world. The political party of our choice, the social circle of our experience, the government to which we give our loyalty will become the source of what we believe.
So we have a choice to make. Do we go with the 10 percent and allow our faith to lead us, or do we go with the 90 percent and follow other gods?
Do we leave our children the Gospel of Jesus even when it conflicts with the gospel of one government or another? Or do we leave them a gospel of nationalism and social acceptability?
At this moment in history we still have much in common with those who heard President Roosevelt in 1941. When the children of today reflect on these things in another 60-some years, will they have to say in the year 2065 that things are about the same as they were back in 2003? Will they have to say of themselves and their society that only 10 percent of believers allow their faith to drive their values, or will we have given them something better? Will we have straightened the road, filled the valleys and leveled the hills so that God can touch their lives? Anything less than that is to have rejected the gospel we have proclaimed here today.
May those roads be straightened for us so that what we give may be of God.
And may we work diligently to straighten them for others, so that the Prince of Peace might find his way. AMEN