Luke 3:2b-16 – The Advent of JOY, "Jesus is coming. Look busy!"

Lectionary Readings for Dec. 19, 2021                     4th Sunday of Advent, Year C
Micah 5:2-5a   “This difficult passage recalls the judges who ruled God’s people in Canaan as it looks forward to the Redeemer from the insignificant town of Bethlehem.”
Hebrews 10:5-10    v5 So when Jesus came into the world, He said, “Sacrifices and offerings were not what You wanted, but instead a body that You prepared for Me.”
Luke 1:39-45 v42 You are blessed, Mary, blessed among all women, and the child you bear is blessed!
Luke 1:46b-55       Mary’s response to Elizabeth, aka the Magnificat, which “speaks of a great reversal—what might be called a social, economic, and political revolution.”
But this week we’ll look at Luke 3:2b-16 with a theme of Joy.

Weekly Meditative Exercise

Christianity includes a long and rich tradition of embracing meditative practices as a way of keeping us connected with God, ourselves, and each other.

Let Galatians 5:22-23 (The Fruit of the Spirit) guide you as you reflect on how you’ve seen God’s presence in your life this past year. This exercise incorporates the meditative practices of mindfulness, gratitude, celebration, and journaling.

Peace through Leadership Quotes

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”  ~ Charles Dickens

“Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.”  ~ Washington Irving

If we treat every day like Christmas, with an attitude of great generosity to others and a time for reflecting on our own relationship with God and the world, we will naturally create “Peace on Earth” around us.

Any time I preach or lead a group, regardless of age, I start the same way. I’m going to say three short sentences. Please repeat each sentence, with enthusiasm.
God made me. God loves me. God has plans for me.

Preface to Today’s Scripture Reading

Today verses interweave the Christian traditions of Advent and baptism. As we’ve discussed over the past three weeks, Advent is a season of anticipating change. Baptism is a public expression of an inward change – a personal commitment to an ongoing relationship with our Creator.

Today’s text occurs 30 or so years after last week’s story of Mary learning that she would become pregnant with Jesus. (We’ll jump back to Luke chapter two “The Birth of Jesus” for Christmas Eve.) John and Jesus are now grown men, and John is at the pinnacle of his ministry, baptizing people in the Jordan River, earning him the nickname John the Baptizer. For him, “repentance had less to do with how fervently one prays or how faithfully one attends the worship service; instead, it had everything to do with how one handled riches, executed public service, and exercised stewardship” (David L. Bartlett; Barbara Brown Taylor. Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 1: Advent through Transfiguration. Presbyterian Publishing Corp. Kindle 2348).

As with so many verses taken out of context, some of today’s verses have been used to make people feel excluded from God’s Kingdom or unworthy of God’s love; that’s terrible theology. Context is everything; John and the other Jews of his time faced a variety of oppressive, life-threatening hardships every single day, from Roman military occupation to an economic system that ensured the top 1% lived luxurious lives at the expense of the other 99%; they could not have imagined our modern “middle classes” or “climbing the corporate ladder.”

Listen to how John advocates for social justice – share your clothes and food with those in need; don’t cheat people; don’t use your positions of power to bully people. John used dramatic words and images as he pleaded with people to repent of their selfish ways and reshape their lives to reflect God’s love for humanity. After all, what good is faith if it doesn’t help people experience real healing and wholeness?

With Jesus’ baptism weeks if not days away, the Advent of a new understanding of relationship with God and with others was near.

Let us prepare the way for God’s words to enter our ears, minds, and hearts.

Read Luke 3:2b-16 and the rest of chapter 3 this week.

If you spend much time down South, you will inevitably see t-shirts or bumper stickers that say “Jesus is coming. Look busy!” In a way, that was John’s message AND he told people how to look busy, how to bear fruit as an expression of their new relationship with God.

Keep in mind, at this point, the Jews had over 1,000 years of rich traditions that gave them great clarity about how to connect with God: follow the rules and offer sacrifices for whatever mistakes you make. In one of today’s Lectionary readings (Hebrews 10:5-10), Paul quotes Psalm 40:6-8 which says, “6 Sacrifices and offerings are not what You want, but You’ve opened my ears, and now I understand. Burnt offerings and sin offerings are not what please You. 7 So I said, “See, I have come to do Your will, as it is inscribed of me in the scroll. 8 I am pleased to live how You want, my God. Your law is etched into my heart and my soul.”

“Sacrifices and offerings are not what You want...” Even the Psalmist understood that more than repentance, God wanted people joyfully following God’s leading which gets back to loving others, caring for others at least as much as we love and care for ourselves (which God also wants us to do).

Now maybe you’re thinking, “This is all nice, but the sacrificial system doesn’t apply to us since Jesus did away with all of that.” Well, yes and no. YES, Jesus did away with the ritual sacrifices of killing animals as a symbol of repentance and dealing with responsibility for wrongdoing. But Jesus didn’t end there.

As the next, the higher, the better expression of our faith, Jesus calls us to a more personal, more immediate, and more intimate expression of sacrifice. Both John and Jesus preached the same message, which I’ll roughly paraphrase: “Instead of giving God dead animals on an annual basis, honor God by sharing the goodness of what you have – your time, your talents, and your treasures – share those with people who don’t have those things.” When we share with others, we are worshiping; we are thanking God for what we have AND for the opportunity to bless others.

Someone sent me a message this Wednesday saying how much he enjoyed that day’s devotional in the Upper Room (“Trapped in the Airport” 12-15-21). It was the story of a family stuck in an airport FAR longer than their scheduled layover. With some encouragement and prayer, they transformed their irritation at the delay into a time of joyfully serving the less prepared, less mobile, and less joyful people around them. This is exactly what God – through John and Jesus – is calling all of us to do each and every day. This is how we “look busy.”

We – all of us – are called to continually connect with God (through prayer and reading the Bible), continually share our highs and our lows with God (Matthew 11:28-30), and continually seek ways we can put our faith into action by serving others (see Matthew 25:31-40: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the sick and imprisoned). This is what it means to live with joyful anticipation as we expect God to lead us into situations where we can bless others. See how interactive our faith is – God-Self-Others?

Make no mistake, this kind of service requires effort and sacrifice on our part. Maybe we arrive late at an event because we shared our time with someone who needed a ride or five minutes of compassionate conversation. Maybe we rescheduled our day so that we could drive over to someone’s house and use our skills to help them fix a problem – a leaky faucet or installing snow chains. And maybe it’s buying fewer things for ourselves so that we can help someone pay for their groceries or an extra cord of wood to get them through the winter.

These are all unplanned, spontaneous moments throughout the entire year when we are able to transform moments of stress and anxiety into moments of joy and peace. These are all ways we can “look busy.” As someone in our Bible Study asked, “What outward expressions would be worthy of the change we’ve felt inside of us?” (FYI, that question is theological gold!)

All of this may remind you of the saying, “We are not saved by works, we are saved to works.” God wants us to believe and to act on our beliefs (see James 2:14-26 “faith by itself, unaccompanied by actions, is dead”). Putting our faith into actions of service is a critical part of a healthy, functioning spiritual life.

Today’s reading ends with John saying, “I baptize you with water, but [someone] is coming – [someone] far more powerful than I am... – [someone] who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (v 3:16).

Through our Christian faith, we believe that we have been baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The Spirit guides us and fuels the fire within us. – Imagine a steam locomotive. – As that Divine fire burns within us and converts the Living Waters God pours into us into powerful steam, how will we turn that incredible potential energy into kinetic energy? How will we put our faith into action as we let others see and hear what it means to be a welcomed, accepted, and included part of the Kingdom of God?

Christmas is now six days away. Hey... “Jesus is coming. Look busy!” Amen? Amen!