Sermon for December 9, 2018 
Read Philippians 1:3-11 and Luke 3:1-6Have you noticed that we meet up with John the Baptist every year in Advent? I’ve never seen him featured in an Advent calendar or a Christmas display, but all four Gospels place him front and center in Jesus’s origin story. He’s kind of a strange character to find there, not someone who cleans up well for a Christmas card. And yet, all of them begin the opening acts of Jesus with a scene featuring the sack-cloth wearing, locust eating crazy man.
And we meet up with John always in the wilderness. John is always set in the wilderness, proclaiming and calling others to repent. So, why do we go through the wilderness in this season that is supposed to be about joy and love and God’s promise to us?
It seems to me that wilderness is not something many of us would choose much of the time. Not if it's true wilderness. Not when there is no end in sight to the suffering, the struggle, or even just the uncertainty.
In the wilderness, there’s no safety net. No Plan B. No savings account or place to fall back to. In the wilderness, life is raw and risky, and our illusions of self-sufficiency fall apart fast. To locate ourselves at the outskirts of power is to confess our vulnerability in the starkest terms. In the wilderness, we have no choice but to wait and watch as if our lives depend on God showing up. Because they do. And it’s into such an environment, an environment so far removed from power as to make power laughable, that the word of God comes.
Remember that the identity of the people of Israel was formed and shaped by forty years in the wilderness. Indeed, I expect that is why our Gospel writers make it a point to remind us that John was in the wilderness. God is always doing new things in unexpected times and places. And from what we know of God's history with the people of the Israel, we can be certain that the wilderness is precisely the place where we can expect God to do new things!
We certainly seem to be in our own time of wilderness, don't we? Everywhere we look there is more bad news. Wildfires are raging, incidents of violence break out over and over again, racism and sexism and greed all seem to fill the headlines and we are a country more divided than we have been in years. The gap of who has money and who does not gets wider and wider, and the global stage seems full of tension and threats.
And often we find ourselves in our own personal wildernesses too. When our place in the world seems shaky and nothing seems to go right. We lose our job, or the test comes back positive, or the money just isn't there when the car starts to rattle or the person we thought we could count on no matter what betrays us. Beyond the world stage, we all find ourselves in times of uncertainty, of risk, where there seems to be no solid place to put our feet.
And so this Advent we are called to encounter John in the wilderness again. When we arrive, we hear his urging to prepare the way for the One who would come after him. I expect it's only after we step into the wilderness that we learn again deeply our need for the One who is coming. I know it's in those times that I am more in touch with my own hunger, my own thirst --- physically, perhaps, but more surely, spiritually. Perhaps it is so that in Advent we pause in the wilderness to be reminded of just this. And to heighten our joy when we encounter the Christ Child once more.
Okay, so we’re in the wilderness and that makes sense, but why John? Why do we spend time with the most outrageous of the prophets before we come to the most magical of seasons?
Because advent begins with an honest, wilderness-style reckoning with sin. We can’t get to the manger unless we go through John, and John is all about repentance.
That’s one of those words that can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Repentance. It conjures of feelings of shame. Images of people screaming about hellfire and damnation and certainly nothing at all Christmasy.
And yet, is it possible that this might become an occasion for relief?
The literal definition of sin in the Bible is "missing the mark," like an archer misses his target. Repentance literally means to turn back onto the right path. To follow the right way. Which is a perfectly good way of looking sin. The trouble comes when we think that sin is a problem primarily because it angers God. But God's temper is not what's at stake; he's more than capable of managing his own emotions.
Sin is a problem because it kills us. Why? Because sin is a refusal to become fully human. It's anything that interferes with the opening up of our whole hearts to God, to others, to creation, and to ourselves. Sin is estrangement, disconnection, sterility, disharmony. It's the slow accumulation of dust, choking the soul. It's the sludge that slows us down, that says, "Quit. Stop trying. Give up. Change is impossible."
Sin is apathy. Care-less-ness. A frightened resistance to an engaged life. Sin is the opposite of creativity, the opposite of abundance, the opposite of flourishing. It is a walking death. And it is easier to spot, name, and confess a walking death in the wilderness than it is anywhere else.
"John went into all the region around the Jordan," Luke tells us, "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." Elsewhere in the Gospels, we read that crowds streamed into the wilderness to heed John’s call. In other words, they left the lives they knew best, and ventured into the unknown to save their hearts through repentance. Something about the wilderness brought people to their knees.
Unless we’re in the wilderness, it’s hard to see our own privilege, and even harder to imagine giving it up. No one standing on a mountaintop wants the mountain to be flattened. But when we’re wandering in the wilderness, and immense, barren landscapes stretch out before us in every direction, we’re able to see what privileged locations obscure. Suddenly, we feel the rough places beneath our feet. We experience what it’s like to struggle down twisty, crooked paths. We glimpse arrogance in the mountains and desolation in the valleys, and we begin to dream God’s dream of a wholly reimagined landscape. A landscape so smooth and straight, it enables "all flesh" to see the salvation of God.
Indeed, John tells us today that this way will be made smooth by our repentance, yours and mine. The path is cleared by our being reconciled to God and to one another. And that takes time. Perhaps one brick at a time. We do it now with intentionality and with hope. Or we will surely do it later, seeking to mend and to heal and find ways to begin all over again, only weakened now by our choosing to not do so before.
In Advent, we spend time in the wilderness, just as we do in our own lives. And we take time to repent, so that the way to God in the manger is clear. That we are clear of the actions or inactions that are slowly killing us. Those things that make us less, that make us cold and hard and cruel to one another. We turn aside from them, and turn to face the one who comes to meet us even in the wilderness.
