Sunday, December 8, 2024

Second Sunday in Advent
Peace
Rev. Brent Gundlah

First Reading (Malachi 3:1-4/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 3:1-6/NRSVUE

I see all sorts of things from up here — and one of them was your eyes glazing over as you listened to all those names of obscure people and places in today’s gospel passage.

Don’t feel bad, I get it; the holidays are coming up soon and so you’ve probably got a lot on your minds this morning: cards to send out, gifts to buy, meals to plan, travel arrangements to make. And so it’s not a big surprise that your thoughts might have turned to such things a few minutes ago.

I mean, who the heck is Philip? Where on earth is Ituraea? And if I had Trachonitis as a kid then I’ll never get it again, right? You might have found yourself wondering, “Why does any of this matter to me today?” And maybe it doesn’t; but maybe it should.

It definitely would have mattered to people back in those days. You see, many of these places that Luke lists — Judea, Galilee and the rest — were parts of the Promised Land the Israelites had worked so hard to get to long ago, but that were now under Roman control. Of course, it wasn’t much different when the Babylonians and the Persians conquered them before Rome decided to have a go at it.

The list of all these people is basically an org chart of the Roman Empire’s presence in the region. Tiberius was the second emperor of Rome, the stepson of Augustus, who was the first; he not only violently oppressed conquered people like the Israelites but is also thought to have ordered the execution of his own nephew.

Pontius Pilate was appointed governor of Judea by Tiberius. Herod Antipas, who ruled Galilee, and Philip, who ruled two of those other places with names I don’t want to have to pronounce again, were the sons of Herod the Great, who was king when Jesus was born — you may remember that he sought to have the infant Jesus killed. In a blatant attempt to suck up to the boss back in Rome, Herod Antipas founded the city of Tiberius on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Herod and Philip, together with Lysanias, who ruled Abilene (not the one in Texas, the one in what would now be Syria and Lebanon), were known as the tetrarchs. Though they had some ability to do what they wished where they reigned (which was never for the benefit of the people), the tetrarchs were accountable for everything they did (or didn’t do) up the chain of command to the emperor; and to keep Rome happy, they enforced the peace by any means necessary.

Annas and Caiaphas were authorities in the Jewish religious establishment — one that Rome had no great respect for but still allowed to exist because it helped keep the people in line. We met them a few weeks ago when they participated in the sham trial that ultimately led to Jesus’s death sentence. 

At the risk of sounding judgmental, I have to say that none of the people in this list was particularly nice.

So, if you happened to be one of Luke’s first readers — one of Jesus’s early followers — perusing this passage you soon realized that you were looking at a line-by-line breakdown of the system that was making life awful for you and yours. The only thing Luke left out was the name of the tax collector who was taking your hard-earned money and sending to Herod or Pilate or Tiberius to fund their lavish lifestyles and your oppression. 

This list would have been a daunting and demoralizing read for Luke’s audience — I mean, that’s a whole lot of oppressors and oppression to overcome. A government defined by greed and nepotism and meanness and disrespect for the governed that seemed like it would never go away. It looked like a pretty hopeless situation; I can’t imagine what that would have felt like.

But God has a plan. Into this giant mess of a society, God sends a prophet to stir the pot — as God had done so many times before when things looked bleak. So John arrives in the wilderness as the herald of a new age, quoting the prophet Isaiah about the impending arrival of the Messiah and proclaiming the need for a complete change of perspective about what really matters. And John is an interesting choice for this job.

He was born to Zechariah, who was a priest (but hardly a mover and shaker in the Temple), and Elizabeth, whose ancestors were also priests, so he had this whole religious thing in his blood; he also happens to be a cousin of Jesus.

In the chapters leading up to our reading for today, Luke tells us John’s origin story, which is kind of wild (it involves the angel Gabriel and a miraculous birth). But Luke doesn’t say much about what John is like as adult; luckily, the other gospel writers fill in some of those details.

Mark and Matthew both describe John as wearing clothes made of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, eating locusts and wild honey. He’s out there baptizing folks in the Jordan River and preaching about the need to repent.  As we’ll hear in next week’s reading, John seems to lack social skills; I mean when folks come all the way out to the wilderness to hear you preach and to be baptized by you, should you call them “a brood of vipers”?

And so, when you stop and think about today’s passage from Luke in total, the whole thing is pretty absurd. It’s basically a looming conflict between two sides — one evil and one good:

On the one hand, you have the imperial machinery of Rome, spread far and wide throughout the region (for Luke’s readers, this was basically the entire world), with operatives at all levels of society united in the common goal of oppressing the people.

On the other hand, you have this one weird guy wearing ratty clothes and eating bugs and saying all sorts of crazy stuff out there in “the wilderness” — a place so insignificant that it doesn’t even get a name — dunking people in the Jordan River and telling them to change their ways. It hardly seems like a fair fight.

But Luke’s audience already knows how this one is going to turn out — and so do we. John may be a little rough around the edges, but what he’s saying is completely spot-on. With the benefit of hindsight, it all seems perfectly clear: Isaiah prophesied centuries ago that this would all happen; John (you know, the one crying out in the wilderness) would arrive to prepare the way of the Lord, to make his paths straight; and Jesus (Emmanuel, God-with-us), the Messiah who was born to a poor family living on the wrong side of town, would show up in this world to live among us, as one of us, and begin to set things right.

And yet, both John and Jesus found out the hard way just how far an oppressive system will go to defend it’s ability to oppress. Sure, Jesus would rise from the tomb and let us know that, in God’s realm, earthly realities like death and greed and power and empires will not have the last word, but we don’t fully live in God’s realm yet, and so we must continue to deal with those earthly realities for now. I don’t know why this is the case, though it’s really hard to deny that it is the case. 

But if the long story arc of the Bible, this still-unfolding account of the relationship between Creator and created, tells us anything it’s this:

God will always come to us in the darkest places and times in our history to remind us of the timeless truths that matter — and that will prevail someday: truths like love and compassion and justice and righteousness for all;

God will always send us prophets to speak truth to power, even though power has never enjoyed having power spoken to it;

God will always place people in our midst who are willing to step up and do that always hard and often dangerous work — people who are different, people who dependably come from society’s margins. And this makes sense; I mean, what incentive do people who are at the center of a system — who are benefitting from a system — really have to change or replace that system?

Years ago, Audre Lorde, one of our country’s great public intellectuals, explained this situation perfectly when she wrote of her own lived experience; she said:

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

And so the work for us during this latest iteration of society going off the rails, of oppression and fear and greed and violence, at least for the moment, seeming to have the upper hand on the virtues God call us towards, is the same as it’s always been when people are seeking to bring about genuine change:

Taking our differences and making them strengths;

Listening to those who wouldn’t otherwise be heard;

Holding space for those who don’t ever seem to have a seat the table;

Loving the people whom no one else seems to love;

Caring for the people for whom no one else seems care.

Doing the simple things that God calls us to do because they’re the right things to do; this is what Jesus did, and it changed the world.

In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party was vilified and feared for it’s combative message of Black Power and it’s work to eradicate policy brutality and the oppression of Black Americans. Unfortunately, their methods of achieving these goals were sometimes violent, and that wasn’t great.

But do you know when the powers-that-be got really worried about the Black Panthers? It was when they started providing free breakfast to underprivileged kids in the Oakland, California public schools. Within weeks, the program grew from a few kids to hundreds; eventually spreading to other cities and feeding twenty thousand kids a day. Educators noticed results almost immediately; children stopped falling asleep in school and crying because they were hungry. And that was when the government ultimately decided to go after the Black Panthers.

Because do you know what really makes oppressors uncomfortable? Ordinary people doing ordinary things to care for other people — showing their love for other people, letting other people know that they matter; people without power doing all of the things that the people with power should be doing.

The question for us — for this church — in this place and time is pretty simple: Are we prepared to make them uncomfortable too — maybe just a little?