Luke
3:1-6
Searching
for Wilderness
James
Sledge December
9, 2012
Recently
the pastor at Lewinsville Presbyterian invited me to lunch, her way of
welcoming a new colleague to the area.
We settled on a date that worked for both of us, and she asked where I’d
like to eat. “I don’t really have any
favorite spots yet,” I said. “You
pick.” And so she later sent me an email
saying, “Let’s try Pie-Tanza . It’s at 1216 West Broad Street.” But the email also added, “It’s in the Giant
strip mall.”
1216
West Broad is pretty precise. I can put
that right into the GPS app on my phone, and it will take me right there. But even though the street numbering system
we have takes most of the guesswork out of giving directions, we still like to
use landmarks to help.
“You
turn right just past the McDonalds. You
go past the elementary school and it’s the second street on your left. We’re the house with blue shutters and the
old VW in the driveway.” Never mind that
the address is displayed in big brass numbers on the door as well as painted on
the curb. We still like to locate things
with prominent markers.
At
one time this was absolutely essential. There was a time when many roads did not
have names, and there was no uniform method of assigning addresses. I lived out in the country growing up, and our
address was Route 3, Box 289-C, not much help in finding the place.
In
ancient times, a similar problem existed in telling history. The modern world is on a neat and logical calendar
system, and so we could mark Pearl Harbor Day on Friday and say, “It happened
on December 7, 1941.” We don’t need to
say, “It happened in FDR’s third term as president, two years after the Germans
invaded Poland.” But ancient writers did
need to say something like that.
When
the Bible tells us about Isaiah’s call to become a prophet it begins, In
the year that King Uzziah died… When
Luke writes his gospel, he has to do the same sort of thing. He begins the story of John’s the Baptist’s birth
with In
the days of King Herod of Judea… When he reports the birth of Jesus he
tells of a decree from Emperor Augustus,
at the registration taken while Quirinius was governor of
Syria.
And
when he begins to tell the story of John’s ministry in our gospel today, he
does something similar. 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, during the high priesthood of Annas
and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
Wow!
A little locational overkill, don’t you think?
Fifteenth year of Tiberius should have been enough. Throwing in Pontius Pilate is okay, I
guess. But Herod and Philip and Lysanias
and Annas and Caiaphas? Is all of that
necessary?
The
opening of our gospel reading today feels a little like one of those
genealogies that pop up in the Bible from time to time. Matthew’s gospel begins with one. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac
the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah
the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and… and we usually quit
reading about there – if we’ve made it that far – and skip to the end some 14
verses later.
There’s
a temptation to do the same with Luke today, to edit his overzealous list of
historical markers into our own, abridged version. In the fifteenth year of the reign of
Emperor Tiberius, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the
wilderness. Except that Luke
isn’t locating John with overzealous precision on the historical map. Rather he is marking a contrast.
_______________________________________________________________________________
In
the year that Obama won re-election, when John Boehner was Speaker of the House
and Harry Reid was Senate majority leader and John Roberts was Chief Justice, when
Benedict XVI was pope and the 14th Dalai Lama was the head of
Tibetan Buddhism, when Brian Blount was president of Union Presbyterian
Seminary and James Dobson was chair of Focus on the Family, the word of God, a
revelation that would change everything, came to a preacher’s kid named Joe in
a remote mountain valley near Mullens, West Virginia. Well not really, but if it did, I wonder if
anyone would notice.
But
the word of God did come to John in the wilderness, in the middle of
nowhere. I’m not really sure what John
was doing out there in the wilderness, but that’s where he was. And when he got that word from God, he didn’t
head straight to the big city where all the people were. He didn’t buy any
media time to share his message. He
stayed out there in the middle of nowhere, and if you wanted to hear his
message, you had to go find him there.
Prepare
the way. Get ready. Make a road, a path
for God. Surely a lot of people missed
the message. Surely Tiberius and Pontius Pilate and Herod and Philip and
Lysanias and Annas and Caiaphas were too important and too busy to go out into
the wilderness, into the middle of nowhere to hear a nobody tell them to get
ready.
Wilderness
exists at the margins. You have to leave
everyday life to find it. You have to
leave things behind, let go of things.
Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years after escaping slavery in
Egypt. It was a place of encounter with
God. It was a place of formation. It was
a place of failings and judgment. It was
a place where an entire generation died on the way to the promise, but Israel
had a nostalgia for wilderness. Hadn’t
God been more available there, if a bit more dangerous?
We
sometimes feel a similar nostalgia. We
don’t always understand it in religious terms, but we still feel a need to get
away from it all. There’s something very
different about spending time in a mountain cabin with nothing else
nearby. No sounds of traffic around, and
at night you can see stars you never knew existed.
I
saw an SUV commercial on TV where a group of guys are driving around, stopping
from time to time to check the bars on their cell phones. At first you assume they are hunting for cell
phone service. But then they find what
they are looking for, a place where none of their phones work. Wilderness.
In
Luke’s gospel, the word of God doesn’t show up at palaces or Temples or
governors’ mansions or big cities. It
isn’t spoken to priests or kings or “important” people. It comes to John in the wilderness. It is spoken to a young teenage girl. It is
announced to shepherds out in the fields. It is born far from home, in a
borrowed space used by farm animals.
________________________________________________________________________________
In
the wilderness, the word of God calls us to get ready. It announces a baptism of repentance, of
change. But how are we to hear? Where
are we to find any wilderness? How are
we to make room for readiness and change?
I
think one of the things that makes a deep Christian faith so difficult in our
culture is that faith cannot be an addition. Faith cannot be acquired, one more
add-on to enhance our lives. It requires repentance – change and
transformation, and that is very hard to do without some room, some letting go,
some readiness, some setting aside. Wilderness.
Wilderness
is at the margins. It is out of step
with the culture, and so it requires an effort on our parts, leaving behind our
culture’s typical patterns. Advent is
about this. It is the work of creating
some space, some wilderness within our lives where we can wait for something
new, something not yet fully seen, something that can transform us. But that can be nearly impossible in our
culture’s rush to Christmas. I’m talking
less about an overly commercialized Christmas with stores decorated by
Halloween, and more about how the busyness and the rush and frenzy of Christmas
takes over our lives, even within the church, crowding out Advent, making it
hard for us to find much space for readiness and waiting, for
transformation. Wilderness.
Several
years ago, John Buchanan wrote a column about Advent in The Christian Century. He is the managing editor, but was also
pastor of Fourth Presbyterian in Chicago at the time. Fourth Pres. sits on
Michigan Avenue, in the middle of what is sometimes called “The Magnificent
Mile.” This time of year busses come from all over bringing people for day long
shopping excursions. Sidewalks bustle
with shoppers amidst the colorful decorations and bright Christmas music. And, writes Buchanan, “We sit in the middle
of it all with the somber purple color and sing hymns in a minor key.”[1]
Ah...
wilderness.
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