Of the four gospel accounts in the New Testament, Luke is my favorite. Luke is warm and simple, full of love and joy, healing and grace. And Luke treats women better than any other book in the Bible. It is in Luke that we find the beloved Christmas story — with baby sighs and soft skin and angel wings. Then we get to Luke’s third chapter and the tone shifts. Warm, fuzzy Jesus is abruptly replaced by loud, livid John. And we learn that even Luke’s good news is often proclaimed in a bad news world. Even Luke finds it necessary to remind us that the gospel message is not a fairy tale about bouncing babies and radiant rainbows. The good news is a reality show and it begins amidst the shards of our broken lives. The good news begins by telling the truth.
I find John’s truth-telling refreshing and cathartic. Telling the truth out loud — to each other — feels like a refining fire of freedom. Telling the truth brings us to our knees in supplication and need, preparing us to submit body and soul to the fresh gift of love and grace that only God can provide.
This day let us hear John the Baptist talking to us. Repent! Confess. Prepare a highway in the desert of your broken promises and your broken dreams.
Harold Kurtz was an old man with a young heart. He was an evangelical Christian, but in the best sense of that world, because, you see, “evangelical” comes from the Greek that literally means good news — and Harold Kurtz was a good news kind of guy. For almost forty years he was a missionary in Ethiopia passionately sharing Jesus with hungry people — people hungry for food — people hungry for God. But long before he was a missionary he was a bomber pilot in WWII — one of five sons in his family to go to war.
In the early 2000s, toward the end of his life, Harold wrote a passionate editorial calling us as a nation to repent. He wrote:
Lately I feel like a stranger in the United States. I am a remnant of what has been called “the greatest generation,” but it’s not the thinning ranks of my generation that has me feeling lost and confused. It’s the debate about torture that has been swirling around me for months. I never imagined such a debate in my country.
Then Harold described how, during the WWII, he would drop supplies to the enemy troops as well as his own, how both American and Germans soldiers would lay side by side as he ferried the wounded to field hospitals, how after he helped capture POWs inside enemy territory, the Americans shared their limited K-rations with foe as well as friend. At the same time, back home, in Oregon, his mom and dad were trying to eke out a living on their family farm without the help of their boys who were fighting overseas. There was a German POW camp close to the farm and Harold’s parents began to use some of the enemy prisoners to help them till the soil. Harold’s mom couldn’t stand to see how thin those soldiers were, so she started cooking stews and nourishing soups and inviting them into the kitchen where they ate, sang, and prayed together. Harold concluded:
I am an evangelical Christian. Jesus tells us to eliminate our enemies by making friends of them. I am certain all of those prisoners who worked on our farm went back to Germany not as enemies but as friends. What has happened to my country? How can my country be debating the merits of torture? [Or unannounced drone attacks?] Why has my country lost the will to make friends out of enemies? What we need is a “single statement from the executive branch of our government that torture is forbidden everyplace, all the time, by every agency and under all circumstances..." [1]
John the Baptist said: Repent. Confess. Prepare a highway in the desert of your broken promises and your broken dreams.
Despite my moral resolve to simplify Christmas, I have already bought more doodads and trinkets than anybody needs or wants. The headline story on the evening news was the glad giddy tidings that Black Friday was a triumph — on the day after Thanksgiving we Americans grabbed more goodies in the mall than last year. With the stock market again rising and inflation remaining low, our economy is once again getting stronger. But my friends, let’s tell the truth. The economy is strong primarily for us, for the rich, for the beneficiaries of a gluttonous tax policy, while at the same time, the bankruptcy rate has skyrocketed and foreclosures are still devastating families. While the number of hungry children and deported immigrant children in America has risen, while hundreds and thousands of the invisible poor are dying in the deserts of Africa, decaying in the ghettos of America, and disappearing in the refugee camps of Syria and Lebanon, our economy shows improvement.
John the Baptist said: Repent. Confess. Prepare a highway in the desert of your broken promises and your broken dreams.
I continue to cringe at each story recounting the number of people executed in the United States since the death penalty, over 1,350, since it was re-instituted in the 1980s. I was impressed to learn that the European Union has totally banned the death penalty. And I was horrified to learn that the four nations with the highest death penalty numbers in the world are China, Iran, Vietnam and yes, the good old US of A. What kind of brutal, totalitarian company are we keeping?
John the Baptist said: Repent. Confess. Prepare a highway in the desert of your broken promises and your broken dreams.
But lest we think that John is only concerned about the sins of the political world, about the sins of all those bad politicians and leaders out there, let’s bring all of this in here — into your life and mine. When I pull my own sins into the light of day, it is not a pretty picture. The cynicism of my mid-life years, the judgment and pettiness toward family, friends, and coworkers is not pretty. My irresponsibility in terms of over-working, over-eating, over-drinking, and over-worrying is not pretty. My sense of hopelessness when I look at the state of the Christian church and the state of the world and the state of my own tired heart is not pretty either.
John the Baptist said: Repent. Confess. Prepare a highway in the desert of your broken promises and your broken dreams.
By now, I imagine that some of you are muttering to yourselves — enough already. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake! Stop this relentless mantra of judgment and sin, this depressing litany of doom and gloom. But my friends that is what we always say when we are confronted by prophets, when we are confronted by the truth. And in scripture, the prophets — Elijah and Amos and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Jesus — the prophets are ostracized and criticized and yes, even killed. Except that today, in the gospel message, a strange thing happens. Today, we are told that people from all over Judea — crowds of people — are thronging to hear the prophet. Yes, they are eagerly gathering to be bombarded by the truth. Why? Because they sense that in the midst of the Baptist’s blast there is also the blessed truth — the good news that with God, and in God, and only by God, all things can be new. In Luke that good news is clear — a new reality is about to happen, and we can be part of it. But only if we change our lives, open our hearts, and worry about other people more than we worry about ourselves.
We often think of the Old Testament as discomforting and the New Testament as comforting. But this morning all of that is reversed. There are no more comforting words than the vision in chapter 40 of Isaiah. The first 39 books of Isaiah are all about telling the truth — about the reality of Israel’s sin — about the failing, flailing people who have been dragged into exile because of their broken promises and their broken dreams. Then in a stunning reversal, chapter 40 turns everything around. The people are still failing, still flailing in the arid desert of exile, but God, through the prophet, transforms judgment into joy.
“Comfort my people,” God says to Isaiah. “Speak tenderly to them. Proclaim that the glory of the Lord has come, that the glory of the Lord is coming, that the glory of the Lord will come again. Tell my people that the penalty has already been paid, and that the rough plains will be smoothed out, and the low places shall be brought high. Announce that the might of the Lord will bring healing to the broken world and that the mercy of the Lord will pick up Israel — like a shepherd carrying a lamb. I the Lord God will pick up Israel and carry her home. Yes, Isaiah, because you have spoken the truth, because the people have confessed the truth, because all of you are the still the treasure of my heart, because of all these things, I the Lord will make everything new.”
My friends, these are the words and this is the memory that John evokes today as he proclaims repentance and transformation. Yes, John is announcing that the glad tidings first imagined by Isaiah have now become real. They are and will be incarnated, embodied in a person and in a way through which all of us can start over and become fresh, forgiven, and free.
The church I served years ago in New Jersey was a small, blue collar congregation that worshiped in a white clapboard building — a tiny sanctuary that could seat no more than a hundred people. There was only one stained glass window in that spartan space — a somewhat primitive window, in the back, made out of cheap glass. But the image in that window was priceless. It was the image of Jesus, the good shepherd, gathering the lambs in his arms, gently carrying them — gently carrying us — in his bosom. Every week as I stared at that window I felt cherished and safe.
My friends, this promise is still the good news — good news with no strings attached. But you know and I know that we cannot truly hear this good news until we first confess the bad news — until we tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the brokenness and the deep need of our lives.
Repent. Confess. Prepare a highway in the desert of your broken promises and your broken dreams. This is the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Hear it. Trust it. Practice it. And then wait for God to pick you up and tenderly carry you home.
May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
1. Source unkown.