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Advent II

Luke 3
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, 2during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 4as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
5Every 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;
6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’


A seemingly simple question is really quite complex. The question is “Where you from?” And the answer is as much geography as the heart of how we define ourselves.

If you have the good fortune of calling Mount Albert home, you have ‘pride of place’ knowing you are not from Brown Hill, Holt, Sharon, Sandford, Zephyr, Egypt, Udora, Leaskdale, Sutton, Newmarket or Uxbridge. Now, don’t get wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a Udoran, Egyptian, Zephyrite, Holtite, or any other Biblical tribe that got lost in the wilds of East Gwillimbury or Uxbridge Townships. You’re just not a Mount Albertite.

For you who call yourselves Westonians, the issue is slightly more complex. You know you are neither Mount Dennisians or Thistletonians (Thistleites?), and never Etobicokans, but someone imposed layers of governance on you in an effort to sow confusion and perhaps deny who you truly are. City of York, gone. Metropolitan Toronto, gone. Mike Harris tried to force a certain sameness on us, negating all the little Yorks and relegating us to a gallimaufry of neighbourhoods and nothing more. You remain proudly from Weston.

Some, of course, claim duel citizenship. Maybe you live here, but you heart is at the cottage, beside a frozen lake. Maybe you are from one place and choose live in another. Near my home is a pub with the marquee “3200 km to Newfoundland, 5 steps from the Danforth.” Now, I appreciate that not everyone has a place in their heart for cod tongue, but the folks who maintain and refuse to renovate the Eton Tavern have a certain sense of home. Those in exile are rarely confused about where they are from.

My lesson in local geography was inspired by a reading that makes the most courageous scripture reader tremble. It comes from Luke 3:

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, 2during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

Somewhere in my office I keep a Bible atlas, another resource made unnecessary in the Internet age, and once the only book to look beyond the familiar Judea and Galilee, and locate places like Ituraea, Trachonitis, and Abilene. Once we find them, however, we quickly discover that it is not so such location that matters on the pages of Luke’s Gospel, but locality, the associations that come when power meets place. All of these places spoke to the geography of power, the places that represent the old order: the order that exists at the moment John steps on the stage.

And John has locality too, but his locality is based on human need, and the associations that come with wilderness. Wilderness is a place of wandering, and soon a place of testing, and sometimes a place in our own consciousness that describes moments of dislocation and anxiety. John leaves the world of order, of streets and neighbourhoods, and makes his way into a wilderness.

The people seek him out, this harbinger of things to come, and listen to his message: a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Here, the prophet speaks to the reality of internal exile, the reality that some live at a distance from the Most High and from the best part of themselves. They are truly wilderness people, missing from the locality of God’s desire and needing to hear that they are forgiven.

Sensing the majesty of the moment, Luke decides to depart from his own telling and repeat the words of Isaiah instead:

‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
5Every 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;
6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’

Notice that the wilderness is still a wilderness in this prophecy. At no moment does the dry land of wilderness become an oasis. There are no trees planted by water, no wells of living water—not yet. There are only straightened paths and level terrain, crooked to straight and rough to plain. There is no radical departure here from the conditions people found when they entered the desert, only the easing of a path to the one long promised, the one for whom we wait.

The easing of the path, in this case, is found in baptism. And the baptism of John is unique to this time a waiting and preparation, his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. It seems the wilderness of our lives is the only place this can happen. John takes the need to prepare and the needs of the people and creates a ritual for the desert. He speaks to the meaninglessness that defines the lives of so many, and the reality of continually falling short of God’s design, and marks a place. He finds a place in the wilderness near Jordan where one mode of living can end and another can begin.

What I hope we discover, in this brief time of wilderness wandering, is a longing for home. I hope it has locality, a place associated with the very best of who we are. I hope it is filled with friends and neighbours, and a renewed desire to love and serve them. And I hope we can find a home beyond wilderness wandering, knowing that God is calling to find and name the places where lives are changed and people are made new.

We wish for this because it has always been so. We can search the past and know that the God of locality is always directing our path and naming a place:

A baby plucked from the Nile.
A people crossing the Red Sea.
The Law given at Sinai.
A loyal woman from Moab.
An ark resting at Shiloh.
A shepherd-king in Bethlehem.
A temple in Zion.
A final shepherd-king in Bethlehem.
An upper room.
A hill called Calvary
And an empty cave in Jerusalem.

Today we continue to prepare the way of the Lord. May it always be so. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 12:36 PM