Getting Ready Backwards

• Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk

• Passage: Luke 3:1-6

I need to stretch before I work out. I need to check the temperature outside before I get dressed. I need to brush my teeth before I go to bed. I need to pray before I lead worship.

There are lot of things in my life that take preparation. My increasingly less young human body, and my mind and heart for that matter, need to get ready before they get going.

Preparation matters. We know this, of course. How many of you have been preparing for Christmas? Buying gifts? Sending out Christmas cards? Putting up the Christmas tree? How many of you have had your grandson come over to get all the boxes out of the attic? Anyone else been up on a ladder lately putting up the Christmas lights? Nativity scenes? How many times has Mariah Carey sung to you about all she wants for Christmas.

Just this past week I saw Santa, the Grinch, Olaf, five singing Disney princesses, a snow queen named Natalia, and three five-foot tall penguins. I am getting well prepared.

This thing John the Baptist is doing out in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord, it is rather different than what we are doing. He wasn’t out there by the Jordan river throwing back the eggnog and building gingerbread houses. About as far as you can stretch the comparison of John’s preparation for Christ to our preparation for Christmas, is that John’s got some basic concept of a naughty list and a nice list and his clothes are abnormal. But nobody mistook him for a jolly old elf.

Obviously my purpose this day is to talk about how we prepare for the coming of Christ. And the stuff we do to prepare for Christmas is not at all the stuff John was doing to prepare for Christ. But, if we’re honest about it, Christmas decorations are not primarily about preparing for Christ. We all know the house can be beautiful and the Holy Spirit nowhere to be found.

But I think we can to all agree at the outset that preparation matters. We know it matters, because we spend an inordinate amount of time between the middle of November and middle of December preparing for Christmas. Preparation matters because it makes the celebration better. This as true for our hearts as it is for the holiday. If we’ll spend as much time preparing our hearts as we do our homes this season, Christ’s coming at Christmas will be better, richer, more joyous. If it’s worth the time to put up the lights, it’s worth the time to get ready for the light of the world.

There is, in our preparation for Christmas, a particular sort of anxiety: the deadline. Christmas is coming, in a little less than three weeks. And it is coming whether we are ready or not. We can be prepared, or we can not be prepared, but we can’t postpone.

A similar sort of anxiety was shared by John the Baptist. He wasn’t worried about a date on the calendar, but he knew the promised Messiah was coming. He knew Jesus was, in fact, already born, already a man, and that the time for him to begin his ministry was nigh. People could be ready. Or they could not be ready. Prepared, or not prepared. John knew, in fact that they weren’t prepared. The people of Israel wanted a Messiah, but they were looking for him from the wrong direction. They were getting ready backwards.

And yet God’s plan of redemption was already in motion. There was no postponing. “It was the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius,” and it was time.

That’s how Luke begins this account. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.” Historical facts have a way of sounding neutral. Luke actually gives us six such facts about who was ruling where: in addition to 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.”

This series of facts is properly known as a synchronism — which is an arrangement of historical events or personages so as to indicate coexistence.

I do realize that I have just defined a word you may die without ever using again.

This whole synchronism, this series of facts – well, yes, it sounds neutral. No emotion and passion…except…

In the second year of the presidency of Joe Biden, when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of House, and Chuck Schumer the Senate Majority Leader, and Gregg Abbot was the governor of Texas and Ron DeSantis the governor of Florida, during the period when Donald Trump ruled the kingdom of Mar Lago…

There. Now there’s a little fire in your belly, right? Now your blood pressure is rising.

You’ve got to remember that Luke is listing a series of people his audience hated. They were all dead by the time Luke wrote, but they remembered. This is not a neutral way of dating an event; this is reminder of a terrible time. Israel was broken apart, the Romans were in charge, horrible people were at the top…things were bad, bleak…the people of this time had a lot on their minds. Politics, corruption, violence, even the religious leaders were implicated.

And then, at that particular time, John, out in the wilderness, began proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Now, John certainly had some things to say politically. After all, he eventually got his head chopped off by the aforementioned Herod from verse 1, though it wasn’t exactly a critique of his economic policy so much as a critique of Herod’s sleeping arrangements, which included his sister-in-law, that ultimately brought the decapitation.

But John’s physical setting and his spiritual setting – and the spiritual place he is trying to get his hearers to reach – these are opposite of the physical and spiritual settings of the people named in verses 1-2. Physically speaking, Tiberius, Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas — they’re all in the cities, in the seats of power, in the palaces, with the servants and the entourages. And the spiritually they worshipped the idols of this world: power, wealth, and the self.

John is not in the cities. He isn’t preaching from the pulpits of the Temple or synagogues; he isn’t raising an army or trying to get a seat in the room where it happens. He’s out in the wilderness, by the Jordan river. And he’s concerned with repentance and forgiveness. He’s concerned with sin. He’s asking people to worry about their hearts first. He is very different from them.

The people of Israel are – entirely reasonably – focused on the Romans, the Herodians, the corrupt priesthood, on all the things about their world that made their life hard threatened to destroy it. And it was here, into this world of power and politics, that the people expected their Messiah to come.

So John goes way far away from all of that and asks them to look in a different direction, at themselves. Not without, but within. The Messiah is coming, but the people are looking the wrong direction for him. They’re getting ready backwards.

For the five years I was in Princeton, I’d regularly go up to New York City. And in New York City I rode subway everywhere. I rarely had a problem figuring out what I needed to do, but there was a little issue sometimes when I got down to the platform.

See, between the street and the platform there can be a rather large number of stairs, escalators, turns, tunnels, tunnels the shoot off from the first tunnel, turnstiles, and passageways. And sometimes, it’s possible to end up on the platform slightly confused about which direction the train is coming from. Since trains have doors on both sides, so they don’t always have to go right to left.

Especially as I got familiar – ehh, overconfident – enough to navigate the city by feel I’d end up on the platform, step up to the edge and lean out and look down the tunnel, looking for the telltale headlights on the train that indicated that next train was almost here. Nothing.

Behind me I’d hear the low roar of the train. Those lucky people going the other direction! Their train got here first. Lean out a little farther; certainly one must be coming soon. Hmm. That other train is getting close now. It sure is getting lou…and stepping back to look at the other tracks, I’d suddenly realize that I had been about to get my head smacked by an oncoming train on my track. I had been waiting for the train, but I had been looking in the exact opposite direction.

John the Baptist is out there in the wilderness because the people are looking in the wrong direction. Repent, turn around, the Lord is coming. Jesus is pulling into the station, but you’re looking the wrong way.

Actually, Isaiah prophesied the voice in the wilderness way before John did it. This is a perennial human problem. When we’re getting ready for God’s action in our lives, we have a hard time knowing which way to face.

It’s obvious why. They are lots of very real problems out there in the world of power and politics. But Christ is coming from the opposite direction! Christ was coming and his light was shining down the dark tunnel of the human heart, not the dark tunnel of first century Jewish politics everyone was looking down. Or, for that matter, the darkness of twenty-first century American politics, or public health, or international crises. It’s not irrational to be focused on these things – they’re very real and very not good. But if we only turn our hearts and minds to look in that direction, where we find fear, greed, anxiety, and anger – we’re going to miss the Messiah coming into our hearts.

And in the end, these people with changed hearts really did change the world of the Tiberiuses, Pilates, Herods, Philips and Lysaniases. It was people with hearts transformed by the Messiah that changed the world, not people with their changed politics.

Tiberius and Pilate are long gone. New people with new titles have taken their place. But the salvation of God still doesn’t lie in that direction. God’s answer for our problems today still comes to our hearts first. That’s still the direction Christ is headed. That’s still the place we need to busy ourselves preparing. It’s still the case that repentance and forgiveness makes a pathway for the Lord to enter our hearts. And from there to enter the world.

Preparation matters. Look around today — look how much preparation goes into this season. We know it’s important. And so give yourself as much effort as you do the house. Say the Confession this morning with an extra sense of intention and specificity. Spend a few extra minutes on your daily advent devotion, especially the prayer at the end, and let the Spirit guide you make choices about your day that leave you better prepared. Come tonight and make an Advent wreath, but then also go home and light it and spend sometime with those you love answering the questions we offer for each week.

Prepare the way of the Lord in your own self this season, so that all flesh shall see the salvation of our God. Amen.