More than forty years ago a play titled, Mourning Pictures, opened off-Broadway. Written by Honor Moore, it is the moving account of the last six months of her mother's life. Jenny Moore was no ordinary human being. She was the wife of the Episcopal Bishop of New York and the mother of nine vivacious children and an author in her own right. About a year before her death, she was in an automobile accident that led to a partial nervous breakdown, and just when she was about to recover from this ordeal, she was found to have cancer of the liver and colon, and this is what finally took her life, slowly, painfully, inch-by-inch. Her daughter, Honor, was with her during most of those last months, and after she died she began to write poems based on a journal that she had kept during this period. These became the basis of the play that tells the story of this particular human ending.

The drama begins as Honor recounts her first efforts to share with the audience the pain of this tragedy. Here are her words: "Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying. You say, ‘Everyone's mother dies.' I bow to you, and smile. Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying. She has cancer. You say, ‘Many people die of cancer.' I scratch my head. Gentle ladies, gentle men, my mother has cancer, and short of a miracle, she will die. You say, ‘This has happened many times before.' You say, ‘Death is something which repeats itself.' I bow. Ladies and gentlemen, my mother has cancer all through her. She will die unless there is a miracle. You shrug. You gave up on religion years ago, Marxism, too. You don't believe in anything anymore. One step forward. One last time, ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying. I haven't got another."

Hearing those words again, I found myself wondering how many times some burdened soul had tried to reach out and found a world so insensitive, so preoccupied, so caught up in one's own pursuit of happiness that no real effort was made to reach back to share. These responses that were made to Honor — were generalizations that said in effect: "I do not want to get involved. I have no time for you. I've got troubles enough of my own. Don't bother me with your burdens."

A famous English preacher, Alexander Whyte, was very disturbed one night because his closest friend in the ministry was at the point of death. Whyte was praying earnestly to God that this man might be spared when suddenly a voice said to him, "How serious are you about this one's survival? Would you be willing to divide with him the number of years you have left to live upon this earth?" With that, Whyte reports getting up off his knees in a cold sweat for, suddenly, intercession had become more than a matter of words. Now it was the precious substance of his own life that was at stake. He pondered this question very deliberately for a while and then dropped back to his knees and said, "Yes! I hereby relinquish half of the time I have left, if this will enable my friend to survive." He got up off his knees with no idea of what the ultimate outcome of this agreement would be. This little episode sets into sharper focus the issue I found myself facing with this scripture.

According to John the Baptist, as well as Jesus, this is by no means an idle question, for the basic secret of human fulfillment is to be found at precisely this point. The most important thing said about us human beings in scripture is that we are to become as the one that came in a very subtle way. This concept is put forward as John's response to these direct and maybe harsh teachings. The question comes, "What shall we do?" The answers John gave to those seekers address the inequities and injustices of that society: food and clothing are to be shared with those who have none; taxes are not to be based on the insatiable greed of the powerful; and the military must stop victimizing the public by threat, intimidation, and blackmail. It is clear from listening to John that the one for which he was preparing the way was Jesus. The advent of God is the kind of image that's only fulfillment lies down the road of giving ourselves away.

This point is not only true in the advent of God through the teaching of John the Baptist, but becomes the focal message of Jesus himself. We may recall the day a lawyer came up and asked Jesus almost the same question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" This was the lawyer's way of asking the fundamental question. "What do I do as a person so that my potential can be felt by others?" Jesus answered and said: "Thou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength," or to put it another way, "Thou shall love your neighbor as yourself." The question quickly came: "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus then moved the audience to see the advent of God in their lives. He told what may be his most famous parable, the parable of the good Samaritan.

He began with a character that was not described specifically at all. We do not know whether he was a Jew or a Gentile, good or bad, rich or poor. His was simply described as "a man," a person making his way down that steep descent from Jerusalem to Jericho. It was known as the "bloody pass" because so much violence had taken place there. This man fell among robbers who left him penniless and half-dead by the roadside. Three people came along one by one, of which Jesus described specifically. The first was a priest, one who was charged with preserving the traditions of Israel. The second was a Levite, who was a chorister on the temple staff in Jerusalem. The third was a Samaritan, a racial half-breed in the eyes of the Jews, who was looked down upon with contempt.

Surprisingly, in the light of the tradition they were supposed to represent, the first two did nothing for the man. They looked at him and passed by on the other side, denying the advent of God and choosing not to give any of themselves to this man's misfortune. Indeed, even more surprisingly, the Samaritan acted differently. He not only saw the man and had compassion; he put himself out considerably to make some of his resources available to this needy man.

It requires a moment of reflection to fully realize what Jesus did in this famous story. The question the lawyer asks about one's neighbor was by no means a new one. It became obvious that this is the central movement of God in the world. It is not unusual that John the Baptist would call on those of that day to be presented in a way that had not been traditional.

It is also the core of why, at Advent, we have a passage like Luke 3 before us. The way God moves us is to make ourselves more accepting, loving, and giving. This is how we, "inherit eternal life," or to put it in another context, how we fulfill our nature as human beings and come to completely understand the joy we are meant to have.

The story is told that when C. S. Lewis was a bachelor, he awoke one night and could not go back to sleep. It was a dark, cloudy night, so there was nothing to see, and the stillness that surrounded him was absolute. Lewis said he had never felt so alone and cut off in all his life, and, suddenly, he sat upright in a cold sweat when it occurred to him that such a condition was the logical end of a self-centered life! "What," he found himself asking, "if we finally get in eternity what we have lived for in time — no more, no less? This means if we have invested ourselves in God and other people, we will get the whole network of relationship, but if we have lived only for ourselves, this is what we get and nothing more." Lewis realized why solitary confinement is such a dreaded punishment. It denies a basic need of ours as social creatures. This is the consequence of a life led denying the image of God within and spending all energies on oneself. We get in eternity what we have lived for in life, no more, no less, which underlines the importance of the question that was posed to John the Baptist, "What must we do?" It is a question deeper than offering a coat, bread, or even treating someone in the right way.

There is an old parable of the man who dreamed he was transported into the next life and allowed to glimpse the places called heaven and hell. The man's guide explained that the one difference between people here and the people on earth was their elbows were stiffened. The man was taken first to the lower regions and what he saw was a scene of chaos, literally, "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." The people of this area had loaves of bread, but because their elbows were stiff, they could not get the food to their mouths and they were thrashing around, striking each other in total frustration. It was the utmost of emptiness and misery. The man then was taken to heaven. The spirit of that place was totally different. Here there was harmony, creativity, and joy. Here the people also had food in their hands and stiff elbows, but because the people were paired off, intent on feeding another, and, in the process, they were being fed themselves.

This is a wonderful parable of the one truth I am hoping that you hear today. The truth of John the Baptist compels us to give of ourselves, in some small way, for God's presence to be made known in all our lives. The advent of God is made known not through the getting, but in the giving.